Christopher Hitchens, the author, essayist, militant atheist and polemicist who penned the provocative best-seller God is Not Great, died on Thursday night after a long battle with cancer at the age of 62.

But, unbeknown to many, Hitchens, one of the world’s most renowned atheists, was raised in Malta where his father served in the British Navy, and his experiences of those formative years of his life could very well have shaped his future beliefs.

Hitchens had written an essay for The Nation, a weekly progressive American journal, in Malta back in 1986, which was reproduced by Wired Malta recently with Hitchens’ permission. It can be viewed at www.dailymalta.com/wt/2007/01/christopher-hitchens-on-malta-part-1.shtml.

Hitchens wrote: “My earliest childhood memory is of the Grand Harbour of this city, a magnificent Baroque and Renaissance fortress which still testifies to the wealth and skill of the Knights of Malta (who did, indeed, use to pay an annual rent of one falcon to Charles V of Spain). In my boyhood the entire island was a British naval and military base, secured by a colonial form of rule and used as an impregnable aircraft carrier against the emergence of Arab nationalism. The NATO powers treated Malta as if it were an uninhabited rock, instead of the home of an ancient and tenacious culture with a distinctive language – Maltese is the only Semitic tongue to be written in Latin script – and a vivid history.

“In spite of their matchless resistance to an attempted Nazi invasion from 1940 to 1942, the Maltese were denied self-government in the post-war years, and shared with the Cypriots the sad distinction of being the only Europeans to live under European colonialism. Attempts to alter this state of affairs were met with every kind of repression. In 1961, the Catholic Church, which here makes its Nicaraguan counterpart appear enlightened, actually excommunicated the entire Maltese Labour Party. It became a mortal sin even to buy a Labour newspaper and children were asked in the confessional to report on parents if they voted the wrong way.”

After growing up in Malta, Hitchens became an engaged, prolific and public intellectual who enjoyed his drink (enough to “to kill or stun the average mule”) and cigarettes. In June 2010 he announced he was being treated for cancer of the oesophagus and cancelled a tour for his memoir Hitch-22.

“There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar”, said Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. “Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls.”

Hitchens, a frequent television commentator and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Slate and other publications while based in Washington, had become a popular author in 2007 thanks to God is Not Great, a manifesto for atheists that defied a recent trend of religious works. Cancer humbled but did not mellow him. Even after his diagnosis, his columns appeared weekly, savaging the royal family or revelling in the death of Osama bin Laden.

“I love the imagery of struggle,” he wrote about his illness in an August 2010 essay in Vanity Fair. “I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.”

Eloquent and intemperate, bawdy and urbane, he was an acknowledged contrarian and contradiction – half-Christian, half-Jewish and fully non-believing; a native of England who settled in America; a former Trotskyite who backed the Iraq war and supported George W. Bush. But his passions remained constant and the enemies of his youth, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa, remained hated.

He was a militant humanist who believed in pluralism and racial justice and freedom of speech, big cities and fine art and the willingness to stand the consequences. He was smacked in the rear by then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and beaten up in Beirut. He once submitted to water-boarding to prove that it was indeed torture.

Hitchens was an old-fashioned sensualist who abstained from clean living as if it were just another kind of church. In 2005, he would recall a trip to Aspen, Colorado, and a brief encounter after stepping off a ski lift.

“I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition,” he wrote. “What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. ‘Sir, that would be inappropriate’. In what respect? ‘At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level.’ In that case, I said, make it a double.”