Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) was a British journalist, writer and satirist. He is best remembered for his reporting from the Soviet Union in the 1930s, his wartime work for British intelligence, and his late conversion to Catholicism. His career spans interwar journalism, postwar conservative newspapers and television, and offers a window into the intellectual tensions of twentieth-century England.

The son of a Labour politician, he studied at Cambridge and taught English in India before moving to Egypt, where he met Arthur Ransome, who recommended him to the Manchester Guardian. In 1932 he went to Moscow as a correspondent. There he wrote a novel based on his time at the paper, but the publishers held it back out of fear of libel claims. He then travelled through Ukraine and the Caucasus to investigate the famine. His reports, sent without Soviet permission, appeared without his name. That disillusionment produced Winter in Moscow (1934), a satire on Western journalists' uncritical view of the Soviet regime.

During the war he worked for British services in Africa and later in Paris. Afterwards he became deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph and edited Punch from 1953 to 1957. He also kept detailed diaries of London's public life, published in 1981 as Like It Was.

For decades he called himself an agnostic, but toward the end of the 1960s he began moving toward Christianity. His books on Jesus and his account of Mother Teresa of Calcutta brought him international attention. In 1982 he converted to Catholicism along with his wife. His legacy is mixed: a sharp critic of totalitarianism and complacent journalism, and a controversialist whose religious witness reached both believers and non-believers. His autobiography was left unfinished.