Desmond Lee (classical scholar)

Sir Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee (30 August 1908 – 8 December 1993) was an English classical scholar specialising in ancient philosophy who became a Fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University, a lecturer in the university, and then Headmaster successively of Clifton College and Winchester College, before ending his career back at Cambridge University as President of Hughes Hall.

Canon Henry Burgass Lee, the young Lee was educated at Arden House,[1] then at Repton School, where he held the George Denman scholarship, before going on to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was again a scholar and gained a Double First, with Firsts in Part 1 of the Classical Tripos in 1928 and in Part 2 in 1930.

From 1941 until 1944, during the Second World War, he also worked in the Regional Commissioner's Office at Cambridge, assisting Will Spens.

[2] Lee published a study of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (1935),[6] and translations with commentary of Aristotle's Meteorologica (1952), Plato's Republic (1955) and his dialogues Timæus and Critias (1971).

That is partly because the phrase here translated 'magnificent myth' has been conventionally mistranslated 'noble lie'; and this has been used to support the charge that Plato countenances manipulation by propaganda.

[4] In an obituary, a Clifton colleague wrote of him: Those who served under him found him either intellectually stimulating or maddeningly remote.