[1] As a postgraduate he wrote a B.Litt thesis on Shakespeare's The Tempest subsequently published as Two Concepts of Allegory (1968), and considered by some to be his most original book.
Nuttall first taught at Sussex University where he was successively lecturer, reader and professor of English and where his students included the philosopher A. C. Grayling and the critic and biographer Robert Fraser.
Instead, Nuttall attempted to undo this tradition through a 'pataphysical approach, where everyday objects such as eggs, tennis rackets, and other mundane phenomena acquire an absurd metalepsis in their satiric relation to Shakespeare's tragedies.'
To him he dedicated his book The Alternative Trinity, a study of the Gnostic tradition in English literature through Marlowe and Milton to William Blake, a poet to whom both brothers had been attracted in their youth, if in rather different ways.
A bench outside the chapel of Merton is inscribed with his name together with that of his lifelong friend and college contemporary, Stephen Medcalf.