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For an hour and a half, the cavernous Great Hall of the Cooper Union in Manhattan was filled with the wit and the coruscating erudition of the man universally referred to as "Hitch". But for Martin Amis - "Little Keith" as Hitchens always called him the most enduring quality was friendship.
Amis, delivering the eulogy, recalled the 16 or 17-hour sessions that they would have together, fuelled by food, drink, tobacco and conversation. "Who could be more agreeable than Hitch?" Amis asked.
The novelist pondered the secret of why Hitchens had been so widely loved over his career as an essayist, polemicist and public intellectual. It was partly, Amis said, because of his "full and friendly" good looks, partly because of his "perfect voice without any mannerisms or poncey intonations like mine" and partly because he loved nothing so much as to argue with himself.
"He was an auto-contrarian: he contradicted himself as if he felt the only person really worth arguing with was Christopher Hitchens."
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