He was born in Alexandria in 1925, the son of a high court judge (Mourad Wahba Pasha) and later cabinet minister.
The grandson of a Prime Minister (Youssef Wahba Pasha) he belonged to the Egyptian aristocracy of the time but was nonetheless a member of the communist party in his youth.
His key contributions to literature include some of the only English translations of Egyptian authors Naguib Mahfouz and Taha Hussein.
He edited the commemorative lectures for the bicentennial of Samuel Johnson's death celebrated at Oxford University in 1986, published by Longman.
His Dictionary of Literary Terms, published in 1974 and re-issued several times, has become an important tool for scholars of comparative literature in the Arab world.
While he shied away from political roles (he declined a ministerial position offered by President Sadat), he was a member of the Shura Council (Egyptian Senate), following the footsteps of his father and grandfather Youssef Wahba.