Ivor Forbes Guest DUniv MA FRAD (14 April 1920 – 30 March 2018[1]) was a British historian and writer, best known for his study of ballet.

He was chairman of the Royal Academy of Dance for twenty three years (1970–93) and has been a Vice-President since 1993[2] and Secretary then Trustee of the Radcliffe Trust.

[5] He was married to the movement notation expert Ann Hutchinson Guest and acted as a trustee of the Language of Dance Centre, which she founded.

[5] Guest's father, Cecil Marmaduke Guest served as a lieutenant in the Transvaal Scottish in the First World War and was later made up to captain, serving with the South African Scottish in France, where he was gassed.

Then, despite a successful career as a lawyer, Guest spent holidays and other leisure time researching the ballet of the Second Empire in the archives of the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra in Paris, producing two volumes on the subject entitled The Ballet of the Second Empire (1953, 1955).