Raymond William Postgate (6 November 1896 – 29 March 1971) was an English socialist, writer, journalist and editor, social historian, mystery novelist, and gourmet who founded the Good Food Guide.

Transferred to Cowley Barracks, Oxford,[1] for forcible enlistment in the Non-Combatant Corps, he was within five days found medically unfit for service and discharged.

While he was in Army hands, his sister Margaret campaigned on his behalf, in the process meeting the socialist writer and economist G. D. H. Cole, whom she subsequently married.

[5] In the late 1920s and early 1930s he published biographies of John Wilkes and Robert Emmet and his first novel, No Epitaph (1932), and worked as an editor for the Encyclopædia Britannica.

[8] Fact published material by several well-known left-wing writers, including Ernest Hemingway's reports on the Spanish Civil War,[9] C. L. R. James' "A History of Negro Revolt"[8] and Storm Jameson's essay "Documents".

[1][14] In 1942 he obtained a post as a temporary civil servant in the wartime Board of Trade, concerned with the control of rationed supplies, and he remained in the Service for eight years.

[15] He continued his left-wing writings, and his question-and-answer pamphlet "Why you Should Be A Socialist", widely distributed among the returning military as the war ended, probably contributed significantly to the Labour Party's post-war landslide victory.

[16][17] Always interested in food and wine, after World War II, Postgate wrote a regular column on the poor state of British gastronomy for the pocket magazine Lilliput.

Postgate wrote several mystery novels that drew on his socialist beliefs to set crime, detection and punishment in a broader social and economic context.