David Guest (6 January 1911– 26 July 1938 In 1930–31, he transferred to the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he witnessed the latter years of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi Party. Upon his return to Cambridge, he joined the Communist Party in 1931. There, Guest led a party cell that included John Cornford, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Victor Kiernan and James Klugmann. This enabled dons such as Maurice Dobb and J. D. Bernal to take a more discreet back seat. It was claimed that Guest would "stride into hall at Trinity wearing a hammer and sickle pin in his lapel." He participated in discussions at Cambridge's Moral Sciences Club. He graduated from the university in 1932 with first-class honours in mathematics. He also offered lectures on dialectical materialism at the Marx Memorial Workers' School in Clerkenwell Green. a sniper killed Guest on Hill 481 at Gandesa, allegedly while Guest was reading a newspaper.

After his death, Guest's lecture notes at the Marx Memorial Workers' School were compiled by Thomas A. Jackson into the volume, A Textbook of Dialectical Materialism, published in 1939. In a blurb for the book, Professor J. D. Bernal called it "the best short study of dialectical materialism that has appeared in English".

Publications

  • Republished in 1963 as Lectures on Marxist Philosophy.

References

Further reading

  • David Guest Biography at Spartacus Educational