He translated around sixty books from French to English, and wrote biographical studies of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon.

His father was a miner who had been sent down the pit aged fourteen, and his mother a woman whose family had been unable to afford for her to take up a grammar school place.

[2][3] He was educated at Durham Johnston Grammar School and went on to read French at University College London,[1] where he wrote a PhD on Paul Nizan.

[4] Interested in trying to link Marxism and psychoanalysis,[1] Macey became a prolific contributor to Radical Philosophy.

[3] After his partner Margaret Atack took a permanent post at Leeds University in 1981, Macey left academia to become a full-time writer and translator.