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).

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. As I reread Confessions during lockdown in rural southern Spain, public discourse about the pandemic was dominated by hysteria and groupthink. There was a conspicuous lack of critical thought and balanced argument about how to handle the virus. Magee’s writing provided the perfect antidote. Exactly when I needed it, here was a book that demonstrated a fearless independence of mind, a wholehearted commitment by the author to think for himself and see where it led him. Add to that some of the most lucid analyses of the great philosophers that have ever been written and it’s an exhilarating, addictive read.

The expository flair that attracted millions of non-specialist viewers to Magee’s TV series is also a defining characteristic of his non-fiction books. A good dose of Magee on, say, Marx or Schopenhauer, Hume or Kant, and you feel that you’ve understood that thinker to the core of their being. Magee always insisted, rightly, that there’s no substitute for reading the major works of philosophy yourself – but as a guide who delivers you to philosophers’ doorsteps with a firm grasp of what they were trying to do, which thinkers or socio-political phenomena they were reacting to and in what ways they influenced later writers, he is, in my experience, without equal.

The clarity and scope of Magee’s writing has had an impact on readers in all spheres of activity, from acting and politics to business and journalism. While tracking down his literary executor online late last year, I came across a YouTube video of the celebration of his life held at Keble College in October 2019. I was surprised to see that one of the speakers was Simon Callow, an actor perhaps best remembered for portraying the exuberant Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Callow said that Magee’s 1966 book on homosexuality, One in Twenty, ‘changed [his] life’ when he read it at the age of 17: ‘It was utterly radical in the sense that, like everything else about Bryan, it was entirely rational, balanced, clear.’ Also present at the celebration was David Owen, foreign secretary under James Callaghan and later one of the founders of the Social Democratic party, who spoke of the influence Magee’s philosophical approach to politics had on him in the 1960s and 1970s.

The clarity and scope of Magee’s writing has had an impact on readers in all spheres of activity, from acting and politics to business and journalism. While tracking down his literary executor online late last year, I came across a YouTube video of the celebration of his life held at Keble College in October 2019. I was surprised to see that one of the speakers was Simon Callow, an actor perhaps best remembered for portraying the exuberant Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Callow said

that Magee’s 1966 book on homosexuality, One in Twenty, ‘changed [his] life’ when he read it at the age of 17: ‘It was utterly radical in the sense that, like everything else about Bryan, it was entirely rational, balanced, clear.’ Also present at the celebration was David Owen, foreign secretary under James Callaghan and later one of the founders of the Social Democratic party, who spoke of the influence Magee’s philosophical approach to politics had on him in the 1960s and 1970s.

Magee’s literary executor is Henry Hardy, an expert on Isaiah Berlin and a Fellow of Wolfson College Oxford. The two met at Wolfson in the early 1990s, when Hardy was in his early forties and Magee in his early sixties. They became close, lunching together every day and corresponding by hand: Magee ‘didn’t do email’, as Hardy – now 73 and clearly more tech-savvy than his late friend – told me over Zoom. Hardy was instantly supportive of my project, saying in an email that he had hoped that someone would want to write about Magee and that no one had yet approached him with the idea of a biography. A few days after our first conversation, I was in possession of a treasure-chest of Magee’s unpublished material: three books (one of which, a novel entitled The Masked Mystery, he wrote when he was only ten), essays on subjects as diverse as anti-Americanism and what it means to be well read, a collection of poetry and several private notebooks.

The notebooks reveal Magee to be much more self-critical and insecure than the polished persona one encounters on the screen or page. Several preoccupations recur frequently – other people, his own achievements and abilities, mortality, the significance of music and the limits of human knowledge. It also contains a warning to the would-be polymath that Magee ignored with such spectacular results: ‘By doing everything you become nobody.’

Hardy had revealing things to say about Magee, especially as regards his ‘massive’ egotism, signs of which are obvious in the Confessions and the memoirs: ‘Everything was about him all the time […] and he wouldn’t put himself out for other people.’ This was one of Magee’s ‘feet of clay’, says Hardy, the other of which was ‘a consuming need to be right and to be more right than his interlocutor. He had a way of shaking his head in a withering, hopeless kind of way, at the folly of somebody who he was talking to who hadn’t seen his point’.

But the two never fell out – partly, I suspect, because of Hardy’s patience but also because Magee’s charm and conversational brilliance enabled him to ‘get away’ with exasperating behaviour. Hardy says he was ‘just wonderful to talk to, because he had an enormous range of experience in different walks of life and he was fascinated by politics, by philosophy – he was fascinated by people in general and had a lot of intelligent and telling things to say about all those areas’.

Buried among the reflexive one-liners in Magee’s notebooks is a challenge to posterity: ‘One day, some person or persons born after my death will write my biography. How will they possibly be able to know what it was like to be me?’If it was egotistical for Magee to expect that someone would want to write the story of his life, it was justified. Magee also wrote in his notebooks that ‘the unlived life is not worth examining’ – a neat inversion of the Socratic injunction that could also serve as a biographer’s motto. Uneventful lives, even if lived by people of towering genius, make for boring biographies.

Magee himself attempted the task that he thought would be impossible for an aspiring biographer. He was the only person who could have given us an idea of what it was like to be him, from the inside looking out, and did so with characteristic vigour in the Confessions and memoirs. But autobiography complements biographical writing, rather than rendering it superfluous.

The book I intend to write will provide a more objective, multi-perspective take on a life than was possible for the person actually living it. I hope it will also show readers what I find inspirational about Bryan Magee: an omnivorous intellectual curiosity, a life lived to the full and a body of work that’s too important to be forgotten.