Read Online Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers by Shashi Tharoor - Free Book Online

blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.” The terrifying Honoria Glossop has “a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.” Aunts, who always loom large in Wodehouse's world, bellow to each other “like mastodons across the primeval swamp.” Jeeves, the gentle-man's personal gentleman, coughs softly, like “a very old sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain-top.” Evelyn Waugh worshiped Wodehouse's penchant for tossing off original similes: “a soul as grey as a stevedore's undervest”; “her face was shining like the seat of a bus driver's trousers”; “a slow, pleasant voice, like clotted cream made audible”; “she looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.” My own favorites stretch the possibilities of the language in unexpected ways: “She had more curves than a scenic railway”; “I turned him down like a bedspread”; and the much-quoted “if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
    This insidious but good-humored subversion of the language, conducted with straight-faced aplomb, appeals most of all to a people who have acquired English but rebel against its heritage. The colonial connection left strange patterns on the minds of the connected. Wodehouse's is a world we can share with the English on equal terms, because they are just as surprised by its enchantments. As we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of his first novel, perhaps that is as good an argument as any for a long-overdue Wodehouse revival in England.

8
The Last Englishman:
Malcolm Muggeridge
     
    D URING 2003, A GREAT DEAL, SOME OF IT VALUABLE , was written about the much-heralded centenary of that great writer and humanist George Orwell. But earlier that year most of the world press missed another centenary altogether — also that of an Englishman of letters with something of an Indian connection. This might not be entirely surprising, since few reputations are as evanescent as those forged in the transient arena of popular journalism, which is where Malcolm Muggeridge, who would have turned one hundred in March 2003, made his name. But just three decades ago, at the height of his fame, Malcolm Muggeridge was surely among the half-dozen best-known Britons in India, and it is a little too soon, in my view, for us to have completely forgotten him.
    Muggeridge is best remembered in India as the man who “discovered” Mother Teresa — the journalist whose impassioned reporting of her work, captured first on BBC television and then more memorably in the 1969 book
Something Beautiful for God,
first catapulted the Calcutta missionary to worldwide attention. At the time Muggeridge declared that he “saw life as an eternal battle between two irreconcilable opposites, the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit.” His admiration for Mother Teresa helped convince him of the triumph of the spirit, and turned him into an increasingly religious figure, who was finally received into the Roman Catholic faith in 1982, at the age of seventy-nine. “God made the world,” Muggeridge observed, “and saw that it was good.” When he died in 1990 it was the Malcolm Muggeridge of Catholic compassion whom the Indian obituarists all memorialized.
    But this was in fact an unlikely ending for a notorious libertine; for most of his life it was the world of the flesh that Muggeridge inhabited, and in which he dazzled. The son of a socialist factory clerk in a London suburb, Malcolm Muggeridge was a brilliant student at Cambridge who developed by his late twenties into a formidable writer and commentator of sharp intelligence, admirable originality (“never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream,” he once remarked), and coruscating wit (Prime Minister Anthony Eden “was not only a bore, he bored for England”). Muggeridge wrote plays, published novels, and reported on pretty much every event of worldwide importance from the 1930s to