[1] Born in Cranleigh in 1920,[2] Furbank, after having attended Reigate Grammar School, entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
[1] While in Cambridge Furbank became a close friend of the novelist E. M. Forster,[3] and also of the mathematician Alan Turing,[4] whose literary executor he would become.
In 1972 he became a professor of the Open University In 1960 in London he married the poet and critic Patricia Beer.
[1] Forster had recognised that a biography was inevitable and had originally asked the novelist William Plomer to write one.
Furbank's other works include books on the poet Mallarmé, the painter Poussin, the novelists Samuel Butler and Italo Svevo,[5] and Behalf (1999) on political thought.