Norman Ian MacKenzie (18 August 1921 – 18 June 2013) was a British journalist, academic and historian who helped in the founding of the Open University (OU) in the late 1960s.

In 1939, MacKenzie won a Leverhulme scholarship to the London School of Economics (LSE), graduating with a first-class honours degree in government.

In 1940, while a student at LSE, MacKenzie volunteered for part-time military service in the Home Guard (during World War II).

[2][3] Alter leaving the LSE in 1943, MacKenzie spent the next 19 years until 1962 as an assistant editor with the New Statesman magazine, specialising in sociology and communism.

On a visit to Bulgaria in 1955 he got a tip-off that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was going to denounce Stalin but his report was not believed until the speech was actually given some months later, in February 1956.

[5] In 1949 the author George Orwell included MacKenzie on a list of probable communist sympathisers that he prepared for the British Foreign Office.

[7]MacKenzie wrote a number of books, with his first wife, Jeanne Sampson, including well-received biographies of H. G. Wells (1973) and Charles Dickens (1979) and they edited (4 volumes) the diaries of Beatrice Webb (1982–85).

He co-authored three novels set during the Napoleonic wars with the ITN television newsreader Antony Brown (born 1922), under the joint pseudonym 'Anthony Forrest'.