Robert Fraser (writer)

He subsequently held posts in the University of London and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in English until 1993, tutoring among others the novelist Belinda Starling[6] and the actor Alexander Armstrong.

God's Good Englishman, his dramatic portrait of Samuel Johnson, opened at the Oxford Playhouse in 1984 and toured Britain with the actor Timothy West in its title role.

Academically, Fraser is both a Proust scholar and a specialist in the writing of his near namesake, the classicist and cultural anthropologist James George Frazer, on whom he has published several books, and the genesis of whose best known work on magic, religion and myth he charted in The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of An Argument.

[20] However, on its appearance in late 2001, it was warmly reviewed by the poets laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Andrew Motion,[21] and by the writers Anthony Thwaite,[22] Vernon Scannell,[23] Humphrey Carpenter[24] and Frederic Raphael;[25] it was chosen by the novelist D. J. Taylor as Spectator Book of the Year for 2002.

[28] In marked contrast, reviewing the book for The Guardian, Iain Sinclair lauded it as "a witnessed romance of manners and slights, a landscape in which cold biographical facts are converted into metaphors of questing vision, delirium, breakdown".

[33] He has published a "critical history" of West African poetry,[34] along with monographs on Ben Okri[35]– a personal friend – and the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah.

"[40] Over the same period, Fraser co-edited with his friend Professor Mary Hammond of Southampton University a two-volume survey of international publishing entitled Books Without Borders.

[48] He has little time for critical fashion and in 1999 coined the mocking term "Theocolonialism" to describe the subordination of independent judgement to passing fad, and the purported tendency among some academics in the field of literary studies to leap aboard noisy bandwagons.

In 2018, he published Pascal's Tears: How Not to Murder One's Wife, a 270-page "opened letter" narrating the circumstances of her death, and meditating on the ethical, legal and religious implications of her treatment.