Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens came into a room the way a match meets a struck surface, all heat and forward motion, and that is very much the signature of a Sun in Aries. Aries is the first sign, the pioneer among pioneers, and this Sun casts its light and leaves a lasting mark wherever it goes. It made him a self-starter, a knight who never backed down, a man who went to many battles and often came out without a scar. He argued, he provoked, he stood alone on principle, and he did it with the fearless, quick-to-forgive vitality that the ram carries as birthright.

Yet beneath that combative surface lived a Moon in Libra, a beautiful, thoroughly Venusian moon that ceaselessly weighs the scales. His deepest comfort came through fairness, elegance and the well-turned sentence, and his private radar was tuned to justice and to beauty of language.

A British author and journalist, he wrote eighteen books, emigrated to America, championed free expression, and became one of the New Atheism movement's loudest voices. He died in 2011 of oesophageal cancer, aged sixty-two, still writing, still weighing, still burning.