In the late 1930s Malcolm Muggeridge’s fellow correspondents in Moscow observed a troubling change come over him. After showing much promise as a newly arrived stringer for the liberal Manchester Guardian, he had inexplicably become one of those cranks whose doubts and jeering threatened to impede the great Soviet experiment. Lacking the vision of a Walter Duranty or the other Times-men who were then apprising the world of Stalin’s staggering economic triumphs, he could only see what lay around him: grief, famine, and the fraudulent rhetoric of socialism. And of course his condition would only worsen, so that by the end of his career fifty years later he would be liberalism’s most dangerous critic and—a still greater disappointment to his old progressive colleagues—a powerful Christian voice.
Listen, for instance, to this recollection in Chronicles of Wasted Time (re-issued this year by Regnery Gateway; 546 pp., $14.95) of the last time he saw Beatrice and Sidney Webb.
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