Hitchens was known for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales.

The British-American columnist Christopher Hitchens was famously asked to testify against the beatification of Mother Teresa in 2002, a role he would later describe as being akin to " representing the Evil One, as it were, pro bono ".

The author and journalist Christopher Hitchens and the German magazine Stern have alleged that Mother Teresa did not focus the money on alleviating poverty or improving the conditions of her hospices, but on opening new convents and increasing missionary work.

* Christopher Hitchens: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice ( Verso, 1995 ) ISBN 1-85984-054-X.

Plus a debate in the New York Review of Books: Defense of Mother Teresa, Hitchens ' answer, Leys ' reply.

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice is a book by Christopher Hitchens about Mother Teresa's life and work.

Hitchens condemns Mother Teresa for having used contributions to open convents in 150 countries rather than establishing the teaching hospital toward which her donors expected that she would apply their gifts.

Hitchens details Mother Teresa's relationships with wealthy and corrupt individuals including Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife Michèle Duvalier, enigmatic quasi-religious figure John-Roger, and disgraced former financial executive Charles Keating.

Hitchens also includes the contents of a letter written to Mother Teresa by the man prosecuting the case against Keating, Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles Paul Turley.

* Mommie Dearest-Slate article by Hitchens about Mother Teresa

Hell's Angel is a 1994 Channel 4 television documentary about Mother Teresa by Christopher Hitchens, a precursor to his book, The Missionary Position.

The documentary was written by a well-known critic of Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens, who co-produced it with Tariq Ali.

Chatterjee and Hitchens were the only two official hostile witnesses to Church procedures for the beatification of Mother Teresa in 2003.

Christopher Hitchens published The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, a pamphlet which repeated many of the accusations in the documentary.

In articles with Free Inquiry and Slate magazines Hitchens said Mother Teresa is widely and falsely seen as selflessly devoted to serving mankind.

There was in Hitchens ’ opinion no reason to pay so much attention to Mother Teresa rather than to very many other people working to relieve Third World misery ..

Further Hitchens claimed Mother Teresa promoted an extreme fundamentalist view of Roman Catholicism and that was never investigated.

Hitchens also claims that Mother Teresa accepted money from Charles Keating despite knowing it was obtained illegally.

Christopher Hitchens described Mother Teresa's organization as a cult which promoted suffering and did not help those in need.

In contrast to the conditions at her homes, Mother Theresa sought medical treatment for herself at renowned medical clinics in the United States, Europe, and India, drawing charges of hypocrisy from critics such as Hitchens.

Chatterjee himself published The Final Verdict in 2003, a less polemic work than those of Hitchens and Ali, but equally critical of Teresa's operations.

Hitchens said that Teresa's own words on poverty proved that her intention was not to help people.

Hitchens has noted some leaders who have abused their positions for financial gains such as the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who owned 90 Rolls Royce cars, cult leader David Koresh, Joseph Smith who had about 27 wives, and Brigham Young who had about 57 wives.

Hitchens mentioned that he had recently attended a Cockburn family wedding in which Alexander officiated, and that he and Cockburn used to see each other more frequently when they had both lived on the same coast of the United States.

" In 1996, The New York Times published a favourable review by Bruno Maddox in which he says: " Mr. Hitchens, a columnist at Vanity Fair and The Nation, is rather convincing " and " Hitchens argues his case with consummate style ".

Prospect received worldwide attention in October 2005 when it published its list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals, which included Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Christopher Hitchens.

In 2009, Hitchens wrote of this period, " Against the Labour Party, which I knew to be penetrated by all manner of Marxists, and soaked in the ideas of the revolutionaries, it was increasingly necessary to support the Tories.

Hitchens joined The Mail on Sunday, where he has a weekly column and weblog in which he debates directly with readers.

In 2011, Hitchens was booed by the audience for a Question Time programme, on which he appears regularly, when he said that sex education was causing teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

In 2010 Michael Gove, writing in The Times, asserted that, for Hitchens, what is more important than the split between the Left and the Right is " the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist ", and in 2010 Hitchens himself wrote " in all my experience in life, I have seldom seen a more powerful argument for the fallen nature of man, and his inability to achieve perfection, than those countries in which man sets himself up to replace God with the State ".

Hitchens, a former atheist, is a member of the Church of England and an advocate of moral virtues founded on Christian faith and institutions such as marriage, which he argues have since the 1960s been undermined by social liberals and cultural Marxists.

Hitchens advocates a society governed by conscience and the rule of law, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty.

Hitchens opposes sex education in schools, which he argues has led to increased sexual activity among the young and a rise in teenage pregnancies and abortions.

Christopher Hitchens wrote that " Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case ," then went on to detail many points at which he disagrees with Steyn.

Becoming a journalist in 1990, he rose to the position of Assistant Editor of The Observer newspaper which he joined in 2000 after having worked with Peter Hitchens and Peter Oborne as Media Editor for Daily Express editor Rosie Boycott, and the London Evening Standard under editor and mentor Max Hastings, who like him had left Oxford after two years, and other magazines.

His later campaigns and writing were mainly centred around the formation of a ' World Guard ' a neutral volunteer force ( initially ) to police Palestine and the partitioned India, and to be at the disposal of the United Nations, which Christopher Hitchens credits as the genesis of the UN Peacekeeping forces.

Author and political commentator Peter Holding called Hitchens ' analogy " hysterical, unfair and offensive ," adding that " some of the criticism directed towards Moore's film displays the very same characteristics for which Moore's film has been criticised ".

" Hitchens was subsequently invited to appear on Joe Scarborough's MSNBC talk show, Scarborough Country, at which point a tape recording of his debate with Moore at the Telluride Film Festival in 2002 was replayed.

Christopher Hitchens points to a statement by former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke when interviewed by The Hill newspaper in May 2004, in which " he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing Saudi departures.

In the book, which addresses the leadership techniques of Hitler and Churchill, he delivered a rebuttal to many of the assertions made by Clive Ponting and Christopher Hitchens concerning Churchill.

Christopher Hitchens, though a vocal critic of Islam himself, wrote in his review in the Atlantic Monthly, that " it is a sort of primer in how not to write about Muslims ", and noted that it resembled earlier anti-Semitic texts which depicted Jews as vermin.

Nevertheless, Hitchens stayed in Italy for nine years ( a record which still stands in the Guinness Book of records ), also playing for Torino, Atalanta and Cagliari.