My favorite Hitchens story, apropos “cheap booze”: He was holding court at a Reason party shortly after Hunter Thompson’s suicide, which comes up in conversation, and I suggest a round of whiskeys & a toast to the late “Doctor of Journalism”... https://twitter.com/derek_j_rob/status/1307402201816535041

We all order drinks, I think I get a Talisker, and he orders a Jameson or something else not particularly fancy. After we toast, I remark that I’d expected him to order something obscure & posh, being both relatively well off & a notoriously seasoned tippler.

He says: “Oh certainly not. If I were to develop a taste for that sort of stuff, I’d come to expect it. And then when it weren’t available, I should find myself DISAPPOINTED in a whiskey, which seems completely wrong.”

(Not, I am sure, the objectively BEST Hitchens story by a wide margin. But I wasn’t there for those, so this one’s my favorite.)