There, in 1954, the young soldiers, among them Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn and Dennis Potter, were trained to serve as translators and interpreters in the Cold War.
[4] He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, but read German and Russian instead of History, which had been his original plan.
He worked as a reviewer of detective fiction for The Times Literary Supplement and the London Evening Standard and wrote a theoretical book—"Murder Will Out": The Detective in Fiction (OUP, 1989)—and two crime novels, Swan Song (1982) and Greek Gifts (1988).
The book received critical acclaim and was praised by John Bayley in Literary Review: "No other work on Pushkin on the same scale, and with the same grasp of atmosphere and detail, exists in English, or in any other language apart from Russian.
He died, aged 68, of sudden heart failure in his house in Witney, Oxfordshire, while doing research for what was to be his next book, on Mikhail Lermontov.