Muggeridge: The Biography

by Richard Ingrams

Profiles the personal and professional life of the English author and journalist, from his early career as a correspondent in Moscow, to his later conversion to Catholicism

Genres: Biography

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 2, 1995

About the author

Ingrams served his National Service as a Private in the Royal Army Service Corps, but failed to gain a commission and joined the satirical publication Private Eye in 1962. In the same year Ingrams married Mary Morgan.

The following year Richard Ingrams became editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye - a post he retained until 1986.

He is now editor of The Oldie magazine.

Reviews

[Edgar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muggeridge was always a controversial figure who liked to go against the crowd. He was in his element when elegantly knocking or deriding someone or something, often biting the hand that fed him (‘reviling the medium that fed him’), e.g. BBC and Guardian. Even his inlaws, the Webbs, came in for ridicule. The Guardian and its followers of course never forgave him for opposing their line on Soviet Russia at the time of Stalin. This, in my opinion, was Muggeridge’s finest hour, when he was brave enough to go against the then socialist line (of the Webbs,Bernard Shaw and others) and expose Russian forced labour and famine in the Ukraine.
Richard Ingrams has done Muggeridge a service by giving prominence to his many phases, not just his latter-day Christian aberration, if I may call it so, and for which, unfortunately, he may be most remembered. As Ingrams says, He had become in old age the sort of person that in his youth he would have mercilessly mocked. Yet, as A.J.P.Taylor said, he remained a cynic who got great fun out of it. Though not mentioned in this book, many people wondered why the latter-day Muggeridge, who stressed Christian charity, could yet hold such uncharitable views of his fellow men.

[The American Conservative]

'The appeal of a Muggeridge—“Saint Mugg,” as encomiasts and scoffers combined to call him after he junked agnosticism—might well be fully graspable only by those old enough to remember his strenuously iconoclastic lecture tours and TV talking-head role. Perhaps, in that most vexing of clichés, “you just had to be there.”'

Read the full review, "Muggeridge, a Century On," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...