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It was in 1973, aged 24 and now working for the Statesman, that Hitchens got a call from his father asking him if he knew where his mother was. She had disappeared and her passport was gone. Hitchens was fully aware that she had been having an affair. His mother had introduced him to the man, a defrocked former vicar, who was a "bit of a charmer," though also clearly a "flake and a third-rater." But she was keeping up appearances, fulfilling her social role as his father's wife, so her disappearance was a mystery. Then, a couple of days later, the Times and the BBC reported that she had been found dead in an Athens hotel room along with her lover.

His father couldn't find it in himself to go to Athens, so Hitchens went alone to bury his mother. A note that she had left revealed that it had been a suicide pact. He also discovered that she had been trying to contact him in the days before her death.

In May 1973, Georgios Papadopoulos's military junta, which had seized power six years earlier, was busy suppressing an attempted counter-coup. "One thing that defined the late 1960s for a lot of us, and that is forgotten now, was the unbelievable fact that in 1967 the army had taken over Greece in a fascist coup." What had been, for the teenage Hitchens, a politically catalysing event—evidence of US complicity in the overthrow of a Nato member state which also happened to be the birthplace of democracy—was now the backdrop to a personal catastrophe.

The bodies hadn't been discovered for two days, and even with the room cleaned, the stench was appalling—she had taken pills; he, shockingly, had gutted himself with a knife. "So I go to the window because I think I'm going to be sick… and suddenly I get my first view of the Parthenon, across from the hotel, in brilliant sunlight. And down below there are tanks, and armed men, and bloodstains in the streets." When Hitchens talks about this moment, he associates it with his first memory of sailing into Valletta harbour with his mother. "I've had that feeling several times," he says. "I've felt it in Cyprus and Lebanon, in Crete, and recently in Tunis. It's how I felt about the Mediterranean. The flash of light, the coincidence of the white, the green and the double blue. It makes me feel that I'm still at home."

The Anglican vicar of Athens conducted the funeral, making no attempt to disguise his distaste at burying a suicide. Then Hitchens set about filing a "second-rate piece" about Greece for the New Statesman, which predicted that the junta would fall. What he failed to anticipate was where the final pressure would come from—events leading to the division of Cyprus. After the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974, Hitchens reported on the denouement, and would later turn it into the subject of his first serious book, making him, as James Fenton once put it, a specialist in partition. Britain had failed in its duty to protect the island; the west had failed to make the necessary intervention. It was a lesson that Hitchens has carried through to his support for the Iraq war.

His mother's death meant the "definitive" end of childhood. "I no longer really had a family," he says. "My father didn't want to talk about it. My brother was going his own way. And in a way that I disliked in myself I felt a slight sense of relief. There would be no more Christmases, or family reunions." Yet he doesn't accept that his mother's death had a shaping influence on him. He considers this to be intense but discrete emotional territory, of no larger significance to the way he has developed his beliefs and attitudes.