Kenneth Starr has finally left the American political stage for a quiet life of teaching and practising law after what was possibly the most bruising encounter between political opponents in decades.

He has left the office of special prosecutor with his final report unfinished but handed on, and his own faith so shaken in his own post that he has described it as no longer workable.

Few objected when the statute was quietly allowed to lapse in July.

The BBC's Nick Bryant: "Repubicans saw Starr as an honest lawyer who lost out to a dishonest president"

Kenneth Starr was charged with uncovering wrongdoing by the chief executive of the world's most powerful nation, a tough enough task at the best of times.

He said he only sought to dispassionately present the facts.

His critics - almost exclusively Democrats - described him as a presidential stalker, obsessed with his prey and guilty of manoeuvring which was far worse than anything undertaken by their flawed president.

Four-year probe

Kenneth Starr's work began more than four years before the impeachment trial of 1998.

A Republican lawyer, he was appointed after the attorney general's own nominee was judged, ironically, too partisan for an investigation into President Clinton.

Over the coming years he pursued the president on issues ranging from the Whitewater land deal to 'Travelgate' to the suicide of Vince Foster, a White House aide.

But the Starr investigations appeared moribund, with little or no reliable evidence against either Bill or Hilary Clinton, until the Monica Lewinsky story broke.

On 8 January 1998, a little-known Philadelphia lawyer, Jerome M Marcus, called Mr Starr's office and alerted him to the existence of the Linda Tripp recordings of the young intern confessing to an affair.

As the story emerged, many predicted that Slick Willy had finally run out of political lives but as the scandal dragged on, the public turned against the president's tormentor-in-chief.

Bullyboy tactics?

Starr played hardball with witnesses, allegedly pressuring Ms Lewinsky not to call her lawyer at her first meeting with prosecutors and he reportedly forced Ms Lewinsky's mother, Marcia Lewis, to testify before a grand jury about her daughter.

Lewinsky: Confessional to friend led to probe

It was these tactics which caused ordinary voters to consider the investigation distasteful and sex-obsessed - a view that hardened when the Starr Report revealed in graphic detail the sexual escapades in the Oval Office.

Friends painted a different picture of Kenneth Starr.

They continue to describe him as a sensitive, deeply religious man who enjoys reading the Bible in the morning.

Few who saw him perform in public, including his electrifying testimony before at Congress, could doubt that his manner was mild and calm.

In May 1998, the special prosecutor defended the investigation in a speech to the North Carolina bar association.

"Many believe that they should be able to act selfishly in whatever manner that suits their immediate interests, regardless of the effect on others," he told the lawyers.

"Such callous disregard for civility threatens our safety, our democracy and the very foundations of our society."

Son of a preacher man

Born in Vernon, Texas, in 1947, the son of a Church of Christ minister, Kenneth Starr graduated from George Washington University in Washington, DC, in 1968, and went on to Brown University for a master's degree in political science before Duke University Law School.

That report in full: $47m in the writing

He worked as a clerk at the Supreme Court and later moved to Washington to work with President Ronald Reagan's Attorney General, his mentor William French Smith.

There, ironically, he helped draft the Reagan administration's opposition to the Independent Counsel statute, legislation that failed.

His first major post came as solicitor general under Reagan's successor, George Bush.

But finding himself restless after leaving office, he considered running for a Virginia Senate seat but later accepted the job of independent counsel.

Successful convictions

While a cloud has long hung over Mr Starr, he has left office having secured 14 convictions related to his investigations of the president, including the Clintons' business partners in the complex Whitewater real estate affair in Arkansas.

He has blamed the media in part for his decision to leave but presidential supporters say that he used it to great effect himself as his office maintained a drip-feed of leaks from the investigation throughout 1998.

But he also lost some of the key public relations battles which were vital to taking on a slick presidential media machine.

One of the worst days came when his own ethics advisor, Sam Dash, quit in protest at Mr Starr's decision to appear before the congressional committee investigating the president.

Mr Dash told Mr Starr that showed that he had become an "aggressive advocate" for the prosecution rather than an honest investigator.

In his own resignation letter, Starr conceded that the public had lost some confidence in him following the impeachment saga.

But commentators put the ultimate failure of his report down to the fact that his seemingly partisan and ambitious nature poisoned his reputation in the minds of the voters away from the cauldron of Washington politics.

"The public never got behind his investigation in the way that it got behind the investigation into Richard Nixon," said Michael Zeldin, a former special prosecutor.

"And without that public support, his investigation went flat.

"Had there been a Democratic special prosecutor, or a special prosecutor without the baggage that Mr Starr brought to this investigation, we could well be in the second year of a Al Gore administration."