Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography

This biography chronicles the long and turbulent life of Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), one of the most brilliant controversialists and media personalities of his generation. Drawing on Muggeridge's prolific writings, unpublished diaries, correspondence, interviews, and his own personal friendship with Muggeridge, Gregory Wolfe demonstrates the underlying unity - spiritual and intellectual - that runs through the many phases of Muggeridge's career. According to Wolfe, Muggeridge, like St. Augustine, endured a lifelong conflict between flesh and spirit, between deep involvement in the world and the need to withdraw from it. From his socialism upbringing under the influence of his father, H. T. Muggeridge, to his early years as a foreign correspondent in Cairo, Moscow, Calcutta, and Washington, to his stint as editor of Punch and his meteoric career as a television personality, to his conversion to Christianity and, ultimately, Roman Catholicism, Muggeridge pursued the truth as a passionate pilgrim. Wolfe delves beneath the public persona that built up around Muggeridge, revealing that his life was often more complex and fascinating than he made it out to be. Again and again, as Wolfe's portrayal demonstrates, Malcolm manifested a prophetic ability to see beneath the superficial fantasies of political and intellectual life. Whether in his early denunciations of the crumbling British Empire or in his courageous reporting of Stalin's genocidal regime in the 1930s, or in his attack on the media circus turning the British monarchy into a "Royal Soap Opera", or in his Christian jeremiads against liberalism, materialism, and the media and his championing of Mother Teresa, Malcolm swam against the tide of his times. Like most prophets, however, his ideas offended many and brought persecution that was as vicious as it was undeserved. His reputation continues to suffer from many attacks launched against him over the years, including the false notion that his Christian conversion was opportunistic and insincere. This biography, however, will help us to see Malcolm Muggeridge for what he truly is: a prophetic scourge of the follies and fantasies of our time, one of the finest prose stylists of the twentieth century, and a defender of the Christian faith who deserves to take his place alongside G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis.