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Fine unread condition gold boards, beige cloth spine and gold spine lettering contained in a very good condition non price-clipped photographic dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by Malcolm Muggeridge; Author Dedication and Index. A 1/2 inch chip at the upper rear jacket edge; the jacket is otherwise in fine condition clear Brodart type jacket protector (see photographs). All pages are in fine unmarked condition and the spine/binding is in exceedingly tight and square unread condition (see photographs). "In "one of the greatest autobiographies of our times" (The Sunday Times) Malcolm Muggeridge writes of life from the early 1930's to the end of World War II." - from the jacket front. "The internationally noted editor, journalist and TV personality here continues his extraordinary autobiography in a volume as brilliant as the first, exceeding it, if such is possible, in wit and narrative interest.The Infernal Grove opens with the author in Geneva preparing a survey, the purpose of which then, as now, escaped him. Thence, back to India as assistant editor of the Calcutta Statesman. Next, home to England, working on the Evening Standard and living in rural SUssex on a base income of five pounds a week. These "happiest years" of his life ended with the coming of World War II, the events of which indeed provide the focus of this book. Assigned to Intelligence, Mr. Muggeridge worked side by side with the Russian agent Kim PHilby and then, having mastered such mysteries as ciphering and coding, was posted to Lourenco Marques in Africa. Though he insists that his only discovery there was that his German opposite number wore an hairnet, there is considerable evidence that Mr. Muggeridge was responsible for the destruction of a U-boat. Finally it was back to Europe and the liberation of Paris; and the final scene is Westminster Abbey, where the urns containing the ashes of the Webbs were reverently reinterred. ("Which is Sidney and which is Beatrice?" Mrs. Dobbs asked in a troubled voice and then decided that her sister's urn must be the little dirty one.) It was William Blake who conceived of carnality as the infernal grove which must be rooted up. In respectd to his own adventures in the grove, Mr. Muggeridge spares himself not at all. His driving force is his passionate preoccupation with the state of man, and it is as constant here as is his glorious prose." - from the inner front jacket flap. "There is not a flat page in this mingling of anecdote, comment and slef-criticism.An international throng of writers, politicians, soldiers, spies, traitors and eccentrics jostles in these pages from Attlee to Wodehouse via Burgess and PHilby, Churchill, de Gaulle, Gide, Chanel, Montgomery, Evelyn Waugh." - The Daily Telegraph. "Much of it, like the preceding volume, is fery funny indeed; his descriptin of being inducted into the mysteries of invisible writing when he joined M16, for instance, is one of the great comic set-pieces that are artfully placed throughout the book.Apart from these, the wit sparkles on almost every page." - The Observer. "Indeed, in those episodes of high-minded farce which it is th especialty of Maison Muggeridge to serve to us.The Infernal Grove is, if anything, even spicier than The Green Stick which preceeded it." - Church Times. "Volume Two of Malcolm Muggeridge's autobiography has all the nergy, humour and iddity of the first.he has invented a remarkably comic character, a creature of infinite artifice and complexity and, having lived him with relish, he now writes about him with exuberance in this.work of conscious art." - Financial Times. ".the book is persistently, screamingly, memorably funny. The beautiful sentences slide on to the page, if anything, more gracefully than ever; the wit and the hilarity, like the cadences, never pall." - The Evening Standard.
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