Malcolm Muggeridge
Malcolm Muggeridge (born March 24, 1903 in Sanderstead near London , † November 14, 1990 in Robertsbridge , East Sussex ) was a British journalist. He was best known for his reports of the 1933 famine in Ukraine and is considered to be the journalistic discoverer of Mother Teresa .
Life
Muggeridge was born one of five sons to Anne Booler and Henry Thomas Muggeridge ( HTM ), a well-known South London Labor Party politician . Muggeridge grew up in Croydon , graduated from Selhurst Grammar School and Selwyn College in Cambridge and subsequently went to British India as a teacher and later to Egypt . In 1927 he married Katherine Dobbs (1903-1994), a niece of Beatrice Webb (1858-1943).
Born into a family committed to the labor movement , Muggeridge appears to have initially been drawn to the experiment of Soviet communism. In 1932 he traveled to Moscow for the first time , as a representative of the correspondent there for the Manchester Guardian . Soon after his arrival in the Soviet Union , however, he became disillusioned. As a result, he drove to the Ukraine and the Caucasus without permission from the Soviet authorities and uncovered the famine that was prevalent there (today mostly called the Holodomor ). Muggeridge's anonymously published reports in the Guardian , supplemented by those signed by Gareth Jones (1905–1935), alarmed the world public about the catastrophe - the Soviet-friendly correspondent for the New York Times, Walter Duranty, contradicted them and played down the conditions under Stalinism . (There is still a heated debate about whether Pulitzer Prize winner Duranty was deliberately untruthful, as Muggeridge later publicly accused him of.) Muggeridge, who had wanted to publish a novel about the Guardian at the beginning of his journalistic career , published 1934 the novel Winter in Moscow .
During the Second World War Muggeridge worked for the British secret service SOE ( Field Security Police ), including in Brussels , Lourenco Marques (in Mozambique ) and Paris.
After 1945 Muggeridge worked for various magazines and newspapers; Among other things, he was the editor of the British satirical magazine Punch from 1953 to 1957 . An article by Muggeridge for the Saturday Evening News , which questioned the meaningfulness of the British monarchy , became a scandal in 1957, but in the medium term this turned out to be beneficial for the author's career. Indeed, in the 1960s, Muggeridge became a well-known British media personality as a sharp-tongued radio and television interviewer.
In 1968 Muggeridge first interviewed Mother Teresa in London. He then made a TV documentary about her and wrote a bestseller about her charitable work in Calcutta . In 1969 Muggeridge, previously more of an agnostic, published Jesus Rediscovered and turned to more and more religious topics. In 1982 he and his wife converted to Catholicism. His last book Conversion (published in 1988) describes his life path as a spiritual journey through the 20th century.
additional
Muggeridge fought a speech duel with members of the comedian group Monty Python in 1979 about their classic film The Life of Brian . Muggeridge had accused John Cleese and Michael Palin of blasphemy . This interview was recorded or replayed in the film Holy Flying Circus . Muggeridge was played in it by Michael Cochrane .
Works (selection)
- Winter in Moscow. 1934.
- Jesus rediscovered. 1969.
- Jesus; The Man Who Lives. 1976.
- Chronicles of Wasted Time; To Autobiography. 1972.
- Chronicles of Wasted Time II: The Infernal Grove. Collins, London 1973.
German editions
- God is on my tail (Jesus rediscoverd). Aussat Verlag, 1973.
- Jesus, the man who lives (Jesus: The Man Who Lives). Johannes Verlag, 1980.
literature
- Richard Ingrams: Muggeridge; the biography. London 1995.
- Gregory Wolfe: Malcolm Muggeridge: a biography. Hodder & Stoughton, London 1995.
Web links
- Literature by and about Malcolm Muggeridge in the catalog of the German National Library
- Malcolm Muggeridge in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Footnotes
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Muggeridge, Malcolm |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British journalist and secret service man |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 24, 1903 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Sanderstead near London |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 14, 1990 |
| Place of death | Robertsbridge |