Bryan Edgar Magee (; 12 April 1930 – 26 July 2019) was a British philosopher, broadcaster, politician, and author, known for bringing philosophy to a popular audience.
Magee influenced popular culture with his efforts to make philosophy accessible to the layman, especially as a broadcaster on the BBC, interviewing a number of leading philosophers. In parallel, he was interested in politics and was elected as a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) for the Leyton parliament constituency in the February 1974 UK general election. He also wrote books, including The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, first published in 1983, and revised in 1997. His interests included the life, thought, and works of the composer Richard Wagner.
Magee was born in 1930 in Hoxton, London to working-class parents; his father, Frederick Knut (or Canute) Magee (1902–1947) was a clothier's manager, and his mother, Sheila Kathleen (or Catherine; b. 1903) was daughter of labourer Joseph Sidney Lynch. His upbringing was poor; having been born within a few hundred yards of where his paternal grandparents were born, he was brought up in a flat above the family clothing shop, where, until the age of five, he shared a bed with his elder sister, Joan. He was close to his father, but had a difficult relationship with his abusive and overbearing mother, who was "cold and distant". He was evacuated to Market Harborough in Leicestershire, during World War II, but when he returned to London, much of Hoxton had been bombed flat. Magee was educated at Christ's Hospital school on a London County Council scholarship. During this formative period, he developed a keen interest in socialist politics, while during the school holidays he enjoyed listening to political orators at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, London, as well as 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 demobilisation, 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 as well as 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 also wrote 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, was 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). He taught philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford for a period but was not enamoured of the analytic philosophy then in vogue there.
Magee returned to Britain with hopes of becoming a Labour Member of Parliament (MP). He twice stood unsuccessfully for Mid Bedfordshire, at the 1959 general election and the 1960 by-election, and instead took a job presenting the ITV current affairs television programme This Week. He made documentary programmes about subjects of social concern such as prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion and homosexuality (illegal in Britain at the time). Interviewed in 2003, Magee said:
British society was illiberal in a number of areas that are now taken for granted... Roy Jenkins changed them and he was bitterly opposed by the Tories. But if you were liberal with a small L there was a menu of social change and I believed very strongly in that whole liberal agenda.
He was eventually elected MP for Leyton at the February 1974 general election. In Making the Most of It, Magee wrote that he decided that the Commons was not suitable for him when he was sitting next to Renee Short, as she constantly interrupted a Conservative to call him a "twit". He resolved not to spend much time on Parliamentary debates, and preferred to make use of the Commons library for his own research and to act efficiently on correspondence from his constituents. He sometimes went out to the theatre on an evening and returned to Parliament in time to vote, having missed the debate.
Magee was on the right of the Labour Party: he opposed nationalisation, nuclear disarmament and friendly relations with the Communist countries. He stated that he "detested" Harold Wilson as devoid of principle, and criticised Callaghan for not understanding the role of negotiations with trade unions. Early in Thatcher's career, Magee had friendly relations with her and the two discussed Karl Popper's philosophy, but he later described her as "limited, narrow, even blinkered". As a member of the Labour Party's Manifesto Group, which advocated unity of all Labour MPs behind the election manifesto, he wrote the pamphlet What We Must Do.
From 1981, Magee found himself out of tune with the Labour Party's direction under Michael Foot, and he decided to leave after he could not bring himself to oppose the Thatcher Government's agenda of curtailing the power of trade unions. On 22 January 1982, he resigned the Labour whip and in March joined the defection of centrist Labour MPs to the newly founded Social Democratic Party. He lost his seat at the 1983 general election.
When asked what he felt he had achieved as an MP, Magee named his work to clear the name of his constituent, David Cooper, for the murder of a postmaster, which he believes the police had framed him for. He contributed to the 1980 book Wicked Beyond Belief, which was published three weeks before David Cooper was released from prison.
Magee returned to writing and broadcasting, which, indeed, he had continued during his parliamentary career and served on various boards and committees. He notably resigned as chairman of the Arts Council music panel in 1994 in protest at funding cuts.
He returned to scholarship at Oxford, first as a fellow at Wolfson, then at New College. He was from 1984 a senior research fellow in the History of Ideas at King's College London and, from 1994, a visiting professor. He found more time to write classical music reviews and worked on his own compositions. He admitted that, while his own work was "whistleable", it was "inherently sentimental".
Interviewed in 2003, Oxford contemporary Lord Rees-Mogg recalled, "we never knew which way Bryan would jump. And as his life later demonstrated, there was always a question of whether he was basically at heart an intellectual or someone interested in public life. So it wasn't a surprise that he went into public life, but the intellectual was really the predominant element in his personality, and the books seemed to represent the real Bryan more than the political activity did."
An important influence in popular culture was his effort to make philosophy accessible to the layman. In 1970–1971, he presented a series for BBC Radio 3 entitled Conversations with Philosophers. The series took the form of Magee in conversation with a number of contemporary British philosophers, discussing both their own work, and the work of earlier 20th-century British philosophers. The series began with an introductory conversation between Magee and Anthony Quinton. Other programmes included discussions on Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the relationship between philosophy and religion, among others. Extracts of each of the conversations were printed in The Listener shortly after broadcast. And extensively revised versions of all the discussions would be made available in the 1971 book Modern British Philosophy. Karl Popper would appear in the series twice and Magee would soon after write an introductory book on his philosophy that was first published in 1973.