SOURCE: Kee, Robert. “Gentle Arrogance.” Times Literary Supplement (10 November 1995): 25.

In the following review of Hitchens's The Missionary Position and Mother Teresa's A Simple Path, Kee offers a mixed assessment of Hitchens's “brief and one-sided indictment” of Mother Teresa.

A health warning seems required. The order in which these two books are read can seriously affect the way each is judged. The sequence above is recommended. Anyone starting with Christopher Hitchens's scalpel-job on the eighty-five-year-old Albanian nun Agnes Gouxha Bojaxhiu might well simply dismiss it as over-characteristic; and, if not particularly solicitous for the balm of Mother Teresa's “saintliness,” take no trouble to read the other book. This would be unfair to the author of The Missionary Position. Nothing could indicate more clearly what he is up against than the simple path here laid down under the copyrights of Lucinda Vardey and Mother Teresa.

A sense of unself-questioning, though...