It's about time I started on this bio

Getting back to my main reading list after making my way through some borrowed books, I've started into Richard Ingrams' Muggeridge: The Biography.

Admittedly, it's another gift book, but from when my collection was almost entirely kept in old paper boxes. Also, admittedly, it was given to me with instructions along the lines of "you should read this" that carried a subtext of "as soon as possible." Five years' time stretches the old ASAP out a bit, but I'm glad to finally get to it.

Before starting I had no idea who Malcolm Muggeridge was and why he was important. Four chapters into the book, this hasn't really changed.

He was a journalist and writer who had strong left leanings, who struggled with religion throughout his young life, acted impulsively, and regularly rebelled against the people or institutions with which he worked. My best guess is that "you should read this" was said when I was given the book because he, like many who study English at university/college, never had a strong sense of what he wanted to do once out in the real world.

It may also have been said since I was given this book around the time that I was on my way out to South Korea to teach English, while Muggeridge had done the same in India and Egypt around the same point in his life. So there're a few things in the biography that I can relate to, including 20-something Muggeridge's interest in Russia.

Anyway, being written in a very prim English sort of way, there are a few sentiments that I find curious. At the head of these is something from a diary block-quoted on page 39.

The diary is Rosie Dobbs' (Kitty Dobbs' mother, and Muggeridge's mother-in-law), and in it she opines on what she foresees as the result of "freer sexual union between men and women": that children will commonly be raised by the state, that women are merely trying to "become second class men," and that these trends could "end in degeneration and sterility of the race[.]"

They're the sort of sentiments that you'd expect from a woman who'd grown up in upper middle class England of the 19th century and lived to see the roaring 20s, but they're nonetheless notable since they're still expressed today in some circles. Is the end just always near?