SOURCE: “Dance of the Iconoclast.” Time 89, no. 1 (6 January 1967): 36.

In the following review of The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge, the editors of Time characterize Muggeridge's career as a reaction to a series of ideological disappointments, culminating in mellowed religious reverence.

In his five years as Punch's editor in the 1950s, Malcolm Muggeridge quickened the dowdy humor magazine with pungent political satire. Circulation shot up. But when Muggeridge proposed lampooning Prince Charles's boarding school, he went too far even for Punch and was forced to quit. Nothing daunted, hardly loath and all that, he went on to ridicule the whole monarchy in a savage piece in the Saturday Evening Post. For that breach of British etiquette, he was roundly denounced, ostracized by his friends—and even banned, for a while, by the BBC.

The end of his career? Hardly. The irrepressible iconoclast bounced back, not by showing restraint but by...