Discover the Best Books Written by Bryan Magee

Bryan Edgar Magee was a British philosopher, broadcaster, politician, and author best known for bringing philosophy to a popular audience. Born of working-class parents in Hoxton, London, in 1930, within a few hundred yards of where his paternal grandparents were born, Magee was brought up in a flat above the family clothing shop, where he shared a bed with his elder sister, Joan.

He was close to his father but had a difficult relationship with his abusive, overbearing mother. He was evacuated to Market Harborough in Leicestershire during World War II, but much of Hoxton had been bombed flat when he returned to London. Magee was educated on a London County Council scholarship at Christ's Hospital school. During this formative period, he developed a keen interest in socialist politics. 

During the school holidays, he enjoyed listening to political orators at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, London, and regular visits to the theatre and concerts. During his National Service, he served in the British Army in the Intelligence Corps, seeking possible spies among the refugees crossing the border between Yugoslavia and Austria. After demobilization, he won a scholarship to Keble College, Oxford, where he studied History as an undergraduate and then Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in one year.

His friends at Oxford included Robin Day, William Rees-Mogg, Jeremy Thorpe, and Michael Heseltine. While at university, Magee was elected president of the Oxford Union. He later became an honorary fellow at Keble College. At Oxford, Magee had mixed with poets and politicians and, in 1951, published a volume of verse through the Fortune Press. The publisher did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves – a similar deal had been struck with such writers as Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin for their first anthologies. 

The slim volume was dedicated to the memory of Richard Wagner, with a quote from Rilke's Duino Elegies: ... das Schöne ist nichts als des schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen ("... beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear"). Magee said later: "I'm rather ashamed of the poems now, although I have written poems since which I haven't published, which I secretly think are rather good. It has always been a dimension of what I do." 

(Later, he would also publish fiction, including a spy novel, To Live in Danger in 1960, and then a long work Facing Death. The latter, initially composed in the 1960s but not published until 1977, would be shortlisted for an award by The Yorkshire Post). In 1955 he began a year studying philosophy at Yale University on a postgraduate fellowship. He had expected to hate America but found that he loved it. 

His deep admiration of the country's equality of opportunity was expressed in a swift series of books, Go West, Young Man (1958), The New Radicalism (1963), and The Democratic Revolution (1964). In 1953, Magee was appointed to a teaching job in Sweden and, while there, met Ingrid Söderlund, a pharmacist in the university laboratory. They married and had one daughter, Gunnela, and, in time, three grandchildren. Magee later said:

The marriage broke up pretty quickly, and it was a fairly disastrous period of my life. I came back to Oxford as a postgraduate. But since then, Sweden has been a part of my life. I go there every year, and my daughter visits me. I always assumed that sooner or later, I'd get married again, but it never quite happened, although I had some very long relationships. And now I don't want to get married again. I like the freedom. His memoir Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 2004.