Christopher Hitchens

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice ran to barely a hundred pages when Verso published it in 1995, and it argued that the reputation of the Missionaries of Charity rested on evidence nobody had bothered to examine. Christopher Hitchens questioned the standard of medical care in the order's homes for the dying, its founder's opposition to contraception and divorce, and the donors whose money and company she accepted, among them the financier Charles Keating and the Duvalier government in Haiti. The book grew out of Hell's Angel, a Channel 4 film he presented the year before. When the Vatican opened her cause for beatification it invited Hitchens to give evidence against it, and he did. Born in Portsmouth in 1949, he wrote a column for The Nation from 1982 until 2002, when he broke with the magazine over Iraq, and for Vanity Fair from 1992. God Is Not Great in 2007 and the memoir Hitch-22 in 2010 reached far wider audiences. He died in Houston on 15 December 2011, aged 62.