Hitchens and Muggeridge in retrospect

“No serious person is without contradictions. The test lies in the willingness or ability to recognize and confront them.” So wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in 2003, on the centennial of the birth of his fellow countryman Malcolm Muggeridge. The two had much in common. Both were middle class products of the English public school system and elite universities; both were journalist-adventurers, disillusioned socialists, contrarians, and iconoclasts. They were not quite contemporaries—Muggeridge died in 1990, just over forty years after Hitchens was born—but Muggeridge’s life offers a lens through which to remember Hitchens, who died two years ago this December.

h/t Kathy S.