MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

I have read most of this great journalist's writings, and have derived, besides pleasure, much useful information and knowledge from them. I particularly admired Chronicles of Wasted Time, Vol. II, which mainly dealt with his wartime experiences in Intelligence and Administration. I also admired The Diaries, which span the greater part of his adult life. He has an amazing facility with words, spinning them with seeming effortlessness across vast tracts of the imagination in a style both fluent and complex, graceful and robust.

Few people could have been more fluent or articulate in speech either, and I always found it a pleasure to listen to him on Radio 4's 'Any Questions'. His was one of the few voices to enliven the programme, and not simply in his tone-of-voice but, more importantly, in what he said with it. For, unlike most people, Malcolm Muggeridge spoke his mind and, again unlike most people's, it was an intensely individual mind, which made it all the more worth hearing.

Few people have exploited free speech like him; for, indeed, few people truly know the meaning of free speech. It takes both intelligence and courage, intellectual courage, to speak one's mind freely and frankly, and this great man had both. His death was a great loss to both letters and freedom. For of all the major public personalities of his time, he came the closest to being a guru and God's Englishman. Not for me to begrudge him that!