Woolf was emeritus professor of contemporary history at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where he had taught from 1996 to 2006.
[1] Educated at St Marylebone Grammar School he attended Merton College in the University of Oxford, graduating in 1956.
Tutored by Roger Highfield and J. M. Roberts, he subsequently undertook research toward a doctoral degree under the supervision of H. R. Trevor-Roper.
His research was on the domestic economic practices of three early modern aristocratic families in Piedmont during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It was through this family connection that he became acquainted with Auschwitz survivor and the Holocaust author Primo Levi whose books If This Is a Man (United States title: Survival in Auschwitz) and The Truce (titled The Reawakening in the US) he translated into English with Levi's agreement and collaboration.