The loss of Christopher Hitchens leaves the world a far poorer place, but perhaps Salman Rushdie's tribute to him – "A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops" – is only half right. Of course we can only imagine what he would have gone on to say if he had been spared another day, another week or another year, but a voice like that of Hitchens never really falls silent.
Readers around the world will be turning to their shelves today to consult his elegant memoir, Hitch-22, his anti-religious polemic, God Is Not Great, and his campaigner's manual, Letters to a Young Contrarian, but in the age of the internet, a writer as prolific as Hitchens leaves pearls everywhere.
Of course he's in the Guardian, reflecting on the treatment of journalism in fiction, defending his friend Martin Amis, hymning Brideshead Revisited and examining the decade since 9/11.