My famous cousin

Muggeridge is back in the news, this time on NPR.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/08/1097097620/new-york-times-pulitzer-ukraine-walter-duranty

My paternal grandfather, George Womersley of Sheffield, England, locally famous in his own right for helping organize the Kinder Trespass of 1932, had a first cousin, Malcolm Muggeridge, who was, among other things, a journalist and BBC TV personality. My great grandmother, Ida Booler Womersley, was sister to Muggeridge's mother, Annie Booler Muggeridge. Both were raised in Crooks, Sheffield, the Victorian row-house district where I lived as a small child.

He's my first cousin, twice removed. A tiny quantity of shared DNA. Probably that high forehead, which my grandfather and father also shared. 

Luckily, my hairline is not receding quite as fast as theirs did.

In a very full life, Muggeridge was also at different times a spy, for M16 during WWII, an army intelligence officer, a college teacher, an early advocate for racial and caste justice in India, and an author of various novels and plays, none outstanding successful but most published or staged. He spent many years in India as a young man and in early middle age, meeting and corresponding with Gandhi; later in life he was responsible for introducing Mother Theresa to the west with a book and several TV shows. He was great friends with George Orwell, sharing some elements of his philosophical outlook, and met and interviewed many of the great men and women of his times.

He was also a womanizer, a groper, a serial cheater on his wife Kitty, and alienated or insulted most of his friends at one time or another. 

The general verdict on him is that he was brilliantly erratic, yet mostly oblivious to whatever good or harm he did to those around him. Until old age, when he mellowed considerably.

The Ukrainians don't hold any of this against him. Together with Garath Jones, he is one of two holders of the Ukrainian Order of Freedom (awarded posthumously) for infiltrating Ukraine during the Holodomor and penning articles that revealed the chaos of Stalins terror-famine and its death toll to the west.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/02/exposing-stalin-famine-in-ukraine-muggeridge-1933

He shared the family trait for dementias of one form or another and died of it in 1990. 

Hopefully I don't inherit that trait. 

Speaking truth to power, though...