For roughly twenty years, between the 1950s and the 1970s, Malcolm Muggeridge was perhaps the most amusing writer in the English-speaking world. I do not say the wittiest, or the most humorous, but the most amusing. More efficiently than anyone else, he could set one to musing, chiefly about how absurd was the world in which we live. Muggeridge’s knack, his trick, his schtick — for before long it hardened into schtick — was not merely to point out that the emperor had no clothes, but to go a decisive step further to note that the poor fellow was quite without kneecaps, a bellybutton, a scrotum.

Muggeridge had mastered the tone of detachment, which allowed him to ask the most fundamental questions as if he were a superior being from another planet where they arranged things like sex, politics, and journalism rather better than we pathetic earthlings do. To master this tone, a writer must be able to distance himself by taking up a sufftciently high view of the spectacle carried on below. From this height, we all appear comic if sedulous apes, with our inchoate ideals, our not-very-secret appetites, our ludicrous pretensions, the grander the more ludicrous.