God’s Spy: Malcolm Muggeridge, 1903-1990

p. 13

“Walks with Malcolm, and he loved to walk, around London, around the East Sussex countryside near his home, were always a feast of wit and laughter. I have never met a better, or a wiser, talker. His sense of the absurd was sharp, intense, and immediate, carried on a conversational wave of hilarious exuberance. Yet it was never demoralizing or cynical; the burden of Malcolm’s wit, like that of the medieval and Renaissance Christian fools about whom he loved to discourse, as in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly or Shakespeare’s King Lear, was always, implicitly or explicitly, that we were all fools in need of laughter, forgiveness, and grace.”