Goronwy Rees was a Welsh

Wales

Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

 journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

, academic and writer. He was educated at the University of Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

.

He was during the 1930s a Marxist intellectual, and in contact with the Cambridge Five

Cambridge Five

The Cambridge Five was a ring of spies, recruited in part by Russian talent spotter Arnold Deutsch in the United Kingdom, who passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and at least into the early 1950s...

 spy ring through Guy Burgess

Guy Burgess

Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess was a British-born intelligence officer and double agent, who worked for the Soviet Union. He was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring that betrayed Western secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War...

. Right at the end of his life he admitted spying for the USSR for a short time, and accused MI5

MI5

The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its core intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service focused on foreign threats, Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence...

 man Guy Liddell

Guy Liddell

Guy Maynard Liddell, CB, CBE, MC was a British intelligence officer during World War II.-Early life & career:...

 also of being a spy. He also sat on the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution

Wolfenden report

The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution was published in Britain on 4 September 1957 after a succession of well-known men, including Lord Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood, were convicted of homosexual offences.-The committee:The...

, and for approximately the last decade of his life wrote a column (signed simply 'R') on current political affairs for the magazine Encounter

Encounter (magazine)

Encounter was a literary magazine, founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and early neoconservative author Irving Kristol. The magazine ceased publication in 1991...

.

Works

• The Summer Flood (1932)
• Where No Wounds Were (1950)
• A Bundle of Sensations: Sketches in Autobiography (1961)
• Multimillionaires: Six Studies In Wealth (1961)
• The Rhine (1967)
• St Michael: A History of Marks & Spencer
  Marks & Spencer
  Marks and Spencer plc is a British retailer headquartered in the City of Westminster, London, with over 700 stores in the United Kingdom and over 300 stores spread across more than 40 countries. It specialises in the selling of clothing and luxury food products...
  
  (1969)
• The Great Slump: Capitalism in Crisis 1929-1933 (1970)
• Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch (1970) translator
• A Chapter of Accidents (1972)
• Brief Encounters (1974)

Offices held

External links

• Page at Spartacus