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Prospect Magazine, Portrait Christopher Hitchens by Alexander Linklater:

“His father couldn’t find it in himself to go to Athens, so Hitchens went alone to bury his mother. A note that she had left revealed that it had been a suicide pact. He also discovered that she had been trying to contact him in the days before her death.

In May 1973, Georgios Papadopoulos’s military junta, which had seized power six years earlier, was busy suppressing an attempted counter-coup. “One thing that defined the late 1960s for a lot of us, and that is forgotten now, was the unbelievable fact that in 1967 the army had taken over Greece in a fascist coup.” What had been, for the teenage Hitchens, a politically catalysing event—evidence of US complicity in the overthrow of a Nato member state which also happened to be the birthplace of democracy—was now the backdrop to a personal catastrophe.

The bodies hadn’t been discovered for two days, and even with the room cleaned, the stench was appalling—she had taken pills; he, shockingly, had gutted himself with a knife. “So I go to the window because I think I’m going to be sick… and suddenly I get my first view of the Parthenon, across from the hotel, in brilliant sunlight. And down below there are tanks, and armed men, and bloodstains in the streets.” When Hitchens talks about this moment, he associates it with his first memory of sailing into Valletta harbour with his mother. “I’ve had that feeling several times,” he says. “I’ve felt it in Cyprus and Lebanon, in Crete, and recently in Tunis. It’s how I felt about the Mediterranean. The flash of light, the coincidence of the white, the green and the double blue. It makes me feel that I’m still at home.”"