Mark Nayler

Why we need a biography of philosopher Bryan Magee

His life was as rich and varied as his work

  • From Spectator Life
Bryan Magee in December 1977 [Radio Times/Getty Images]

When I was a philosophy student at King’s College London in my early twenties, I came across a book called Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee. A history of western philosophy told through the story of the author’s relationship with it, it opens with a three- or four-year old Magee trying to catch himself falling asleep every night. Try as he might, he can never experience himself crossing the threshold from wakefulness into unconsciousness, a conundrum that keeps him in a state of ‘active mystification’. Magee spent the rest of his life like this, wrestling with the mysteries inherent in everyday experience. Far from being a fusty academic discipline with no relevance to the ‘real’ world, philosophy was, for him, an existential matter of immediate importance.

When Magee died in July 2019, aged 89, he left 22 books to posterity, ranging from poetry, travel and fiction to acclaimed works on Wagner and Schopenhauer. But it’s not just this timeless body of work that makes him so fascinating. As revealed by Confessions and three volumes of memoirs, Magee’s life was as rich and varied as his writing.

Born in 1930 to an East End shopkeeping family, he won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital and then attended Keble College, Oxford, where he took degrees in history and in philosophy, politics and economics, and became president of the Union. Magee packed several careers into the next seven decades: TV and radio broadcaster, roving journalist, member of parliament, philosophy teacher and author. He became a familiar face on TV during the 1970s and 1980s with two hugely popular BBC series on philosophy, Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers (both of which can be found on YouTube).

I reread Confessions during lockdown in rural southern Spain, when discourse about the pandemic was dominated by hysteria and groupthink. Magee’s writing provided the perfect antidote

The idea of making Magee himself the subject of a book first occurred to me in spring 2020, almost two decades after my first encounter with his writing.

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