Best Selling Books by Malcolm Muggeridge

Excerpts drawn from books, essays, journalism, broadcasts, scripts, diaries and letters, 1926-1986.

For each successive generation the story of Jesus needs to be looked at afresh through contemporary eyes. Malcolm Muggeridge, a distinguished international journalist and sometime editor of Punch, a sharp-tongued social commentator and television controversialist, has come to have an intense and highly personal preoccupation with Jesus and his teaching. Though he is now a fervent believer in the unique truth and continuing relevance of Jesus, as revealed in the Gospels, in the stupendous drama of the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection, he accepts no sectarian rules, and is sceptical about current attempts to make Christianity conform to today''s materialistic outlook and values. To look for Jesus in history, he insists, is as futile as supposing that his Kingdom can be realized through politics and advanced by the exercise of power. His concern is with the essential significance of Jesus''s birth, life, ministry, death and continuing presence in the world. At the same time, he relates the traditional Christianity, which has been handed down to us, to life as it is lived today, with all its dilemmas and controversies and conflicts. One process, to which every Christian testimony ministers; from the simplest and crudest to the most articulate and sophisticated, from the Apostle Paul and St Augustine to a Mother Teresa and a Dietrich Bonhoeffer in our own time; but still deriving from that dramatic intervention of God in history two thousand years ago. This is a book which will command attention, arouse debate, and yet give much food for thought among those who really want to get back to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, out of which our civilization was born, on which it has sustained itself and flourished, and lacking which, Mr Muggeridge considers, it will surely perish. Professor William Barclay writes of the book: ''It is a compulsive reading...I have no doubt at all that it is an act of witness, one man''s testimony to Jesus. I think that the dedication on the first page--"I write this book for love of your love"--from Augustine, does really characterize it. It is a book written from the heart, and I do not doubt that it will reach the heart.'' Illustrating Mr Muggeridge''s narrative and argument, the book reproduces a series of very relevant, and often quite unfamiliar, images of the life of Jesus, not merely from the works of great and original artists such as El Greco, Bruegel, Blake and Van Gogh, but also from early mosaics, ikons, medieval stained glass windows and church sculptures of great beauty. -Publisher

"Malcolm Muggeridge was one of Great Britain''s mostwell-known journalists and television personalities, having interviewed practically every major public figure of his time. He shocked the world with his conversion to Christianity later in life. ""St. Mugg"", as he was affectionately known, was clear in his new-found faith: ""It is the truth that has died, not God,"" and ""Jesus was God or he was nothing."" These wonderful selections of Muggeridge''s writings and speeches cover a wide variety of spiritualthemes, revealing his profound faith, great wit, and lively writing style. Topics include ""Jesus: The Man Who Lives"", ""Is There a God?"", ""The Prospect of Death"", ""Do We NeedReligion?"", ""Peace and Power"", and many more. ""The counter-countercultural declaration of Mr. Muggeridge''sconversion was especially eye-catching given the great legions traveling in the opposite direction. His largerpublic knew him through his work as a television host and critic. But all of literate England, and much of America, knew him as a learned and incisive journalist who had written Winter in Moscow, a searing exposé of Communism. His intellect and historical savoir-faire gave hiscriticisms a very long reach. In America he made regular appearances as book editor of Esquire magazine. NoEnglishman has a more mordant, more attractive wit.""

A collection of the author''s thoughts about faith, God, and age.

From the book: " What is a conversion? The question is like asking, ''What is falling in love?'' There is no standard procedure, no fixed time. No Damascus Road experience has been vouchsafed me; I have just stumbled on, like Bunyan''s Pilgrim, falling into the Slough of Despond, locked up in Doubting Castle, terrified at passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death; from time to time, by God''s mercy, relieved of my burden of sin, but only, alas, soon to acquire it again." "From my earliest years, there was something going on inside me other than vague aspirations to make a name for myself and a stir in the world: something that led me to feel myself a stranger among strangers in a strange land, whose true habitat was elsewhere, another destiny whose realization would swallow up time into Eternity, transform flesh into spirit, knowledge into faith, and reveal in transcendental terms what our earthly life truly signifies." In November 1982, Malcolm Muggeridge was received into the Roman Catholic Church, an event which attracted much attention and curiosity. To Malcolm Muggeridge, it signified "a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life." Malcolm Muggeridge, well known around the world in the latter part of the twentieth century as a journalist, writer, and media figure, is still remembered as a vociferous unbeliever for a great part of his career. But always he had had an awareness that another dimension existed, that there was a destiny beyond the devices and desires of the ego, and that earthly life could not be the end. This book, first published in 1988 and the last of his writing to be published in his lifetime, is a personal statement of the history and development of his religious beliefs. An important section relates to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, latterly beatified, and with expectations to becoming a Saint. Her influence was perhaps the most powerful force leading this deeply thinking man to God and to the Roman Catholic Church. He describes also the effect upon him of meetings with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a man whom he considers to be one of the greatest prophets of our time, with a profound spiritual message for our turbulent world. This moving testimony is not about the mechanics of becoming a Roman Catholic. Rather, it is about a series of happenings, occasions of enlightenment, that led one spiritually troubled man to find God. It is a statement of belief which will fascinate all who are interested in the workings of the human mind, and will inspire all who seek the Truth.

England''s "bad boy" essayist and critic uses his wit and iconoclastic talents to deflate a number of sacred cows.

Selected addresses and interviews.

A Modern pilgrim explores the spiritual wanderings of Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky. Based on an acclaimed TV series, this illuminating collection of portraits brings to life seven men in search of God, seven maverick thinkers whose spiritual wanderings make for unforgettable reading.

John Bosco is a favorite saint of all Catholic youth but especially of boys. A Story of St. John Bosco details the very interesting story about the life of John Bosco, a story that has had a great influence on Catholic youth the past 100 years.

Rev. ed. published as: Muggeridge, ancient & modern. 1981.

This is a fictionalized account of Stalin''s Moscow. Muggeridge expresses his disillusionment with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and exposes the willful credulity of the many British and American journalists who refused to see the truth about Soviet life and misrepresented the facts to the outside world. Through adroit use of satire, he portrays them as they dutifully tour Soviet construction projects and witness staged trials, blithely overlooking starving citizens and unharvested crops, and all the while reporting statistics and writing stories in support of the utopian claims of the government.

"The media in general, and TV in particular, are incomparably the greatest single influence in our society . This influence is, in my opinion, largely exerted irresponsibly, arbitrarily, and without reference to any moral or intellectual, still less spiritual guidelines whatsoever." Throughout his journalistic career, Malcolm Muggeridge was a commentator. On radio and television, as a lecturer, journalist and author, he fascinated, delighted, provoked-and sometimes infuriated-his audiences. Christ and the Media is a sharp, witty critique of media-oriented culture with such intriguing fantasies as the "the Fourth Temptation," in which Jesus is approached with the offer of a worldwide TV network. "Future historians," wrote Muggeridge, "will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster which no one knows how to control or direct, and marvel that we should have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence. Born in 1903 started his career as a university lecturer at the university in Cairo before taking up journalism. As a journalist he worked around the world on the Guardian, Calcutta Statesman, the Evening Standard and the Daily Telegraph, and then in 1953 became editor of Punch where he remained for four years. In later years he became best known as a broadcaster both on television and radio for the BBC. His other books include Jesus Rediscovered, Jesus: The Man Who Lives, and A Third Testament. He died in 1990.

A collection of Muggeridge''s writings. Demonstrates that his preoccupation with might broadly be called "religious" questions is no recent quirk, but a theme running through all his writings.

The speaker asserts that people who try to make themselves happy in earthly terms are doomed to failure.