Humphrey House (1908-1955) was a British literary critic, academic, and scholar, educated at Repton School and later at Wadham College, Oxford, where he studied Classics and English Literature.

His academic prowess and critical insight positioned him early on as a rising intellectual voice within English literary circles. While an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1920s, he was friends with Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender.

In 1936, House moved to India to lecture at the University of Calcutta (Kolkata). During this period, he became part of a circle of progressive Indian and British intellectuals, writers, artists and disaffected colonialists, which included included John Auden, Michael Carritt, Judge Amir Ali and Jamani Roy, from whom he purchased several paintings directly.

Whilst in Calcutta House was suspected of being a spy and became an early target of the colonial government’s culture of repression, police surveillance, and suppression of free speech in the late 1930s. He contributed to the academic journal Parichay and in 1937, published a satirical pamphlet titled I Spy with My Little Eye - a critique of censorship and state scrutiny - which was subsequently banned by the Raj.

Due to his tone of voice in the pamphlet, he weas asked to leave the University of Calcutta, and moved to Presidency College, where he taught for a further year before returning to England, where he continued his academic career until his death in 1955.