Bryan Magee in context

I’ve been captivated these last couple of days by the autobiographies of Bryan Magee (1930-2019) who is remembered here and celebrated on this video. Unusually. two of the autobiographies cover his early years; a third (published in 2018) starts as he makes his way in the world and a fourth is effectively an intellectual biography – “Confessions of a Philosopher” (1997). All are powerfully written – doubts and conflicts evoked almost from the opening pages and a start intellectual honesty pervades the pages

He was a household name from his television broadcasts about philosophy which were captured in the book of his interviews with such thinkers as Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, AJ Ayer and JP Stern which came out in 1987 The Great Philosophers – an intro to Western Philosophers 

I need writing which makes me look at the world in a different way. Rather slowly I’ve grown to understand that clarity and elegance of language is needed for this task. Essayist Tom Wolfe was a favourite of mine ever since I first read his Mau Mauing the flak catchers in 1970. James Meek is exceptional for his ability to reduce economic complexities to 5 or 10 thousand word essays – ditto Jonathan Meades for his forensic analyses of cultural issues.

But it was Arthur Koestler who first stunned me (in my late teens) with memorable writing – hardly surprising given his amazing background. Only Victor Serge could rival the enormity of the events which shaped him. How can those who have known only a quiet bourgeois English life possibly give us insights into other worlds? And yet a few writers manage to do it. 

Somehow academic specialists are rarely able to produce prose which grips…Is it the unrealistic restriction of the scope of their inquiries vision which causes the deadness of their prose – or perhaps the ultra security of their institutional base??

It’s this question which led me to offer this matrix of good journalistic writers dividing them according to their focus on people, ideas, events or places – but also according to their source of income, testing if you like a thesis about the rigidities of the academic base.

I wanted to include examples from countries beyond the UK and managed 20 – whose nationalities are clearly designated in the table. 

Good “Journalistic” writers – by focus, base and nationality

Source of income	People	Ideas	Events	Places	Mixed genres
freelance	Biographers	Peter Watson Naomi Klein  (Can) Charles Handy Bryan Magee	Victor Serge (Be) Kenneth Roy Masha Gessen (RU)	John Ardagh Dervla Murphy Jan Morris Neal Ascherson Philip Marsden Giles Milton	George Orwell Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Ger) Francis Wheen Arundati Roy (India) Joan Didion  US Tariq Ali  (Pak/UK)
Academia	Biographers	Mark Greif  USA Mark Lilla  USA Perry Anderson USA Jill Lepore  USA	Historians Political scientists Economists	Geographers Anthropologists Sociologists	Raymond Aron  (France) Michael Pollan  USA
Journal newspaper             Television	Oriana Fallaci (It)   Joseph Epstein (US)             Clive James	Francois Bondy (Sw) Claude Roy  (Fr) Chris Hitchens Martin Jacques Paul Mason George Monbiot Duncan Campbell Owen Jones  Adam Curtis	Arthur Koestler Hu/UK Vasily Grossman (Ru) Seb Haffner (Ger) Joseph Roth (Ger) Rudolf Augstein (Ger) Paul Foot Patrick Cockburn Simon Jenkins	Luigi Barzini (It) Andrew Sampson Svetlana Alexievich (Belarussia) Robert Kaplan  (US) Geert Mak  (Neth) John Hooper John Pilger (Aust) Robert Fisk Tobias Jones	Anthony Lane James Meek Andrew O Hagen
Think Tank		David Goodhart Susan George (US)