Since you weren't invited to last Friday's intellectually-studded memorial for Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair has now posted video of the full event online. The service, which was held last week at the Cooper Union in New York, was a who's who of brainy, mostly British elites, plus Sean Penn. Much of the ceremony included Hitch's friends and colleagues reading some of their favorite pieces of his, but also included a lot of personal memories and good humor of the writer and debater who died of cancer last December. The highlight is probably author Martin Amis' teasing eulogy — "not always rational and certainly not prudent" and "self-mythologizing", but "one of the sanest people I've ever known," according to Amis — but there are also plenty of remembrances from Salmon Rushdie, Stephen Fry, Christopher Buckley, Ian McEwen, Douglas Brinkley, and many others.

The ceremony is broken up into several videos, but they're all linked from the same page, including the retrospective of Hitchens' himself  which was compiled by documentarian Alex Gibney and shown to the audience during the event.

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Dashiell Bennett