Nicholas Boyle

Who is Nicholas Boyle?

Nicholas Boyle FBA is the Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has written widely on German literature, intellectual history and religion and is known particularly for his award-winning extensive biography of Goethe. Boyle became a fellow of the British Academy in 2000.

Boyle's biography of Goethe currently runs to two volumes and he is writing the third. George Steiner has called him a 'critic of vivacious perspicacity' and compares the scope of his work to "Lord Bullock's double portraits of Hitler and Stalin, Richard Holmes's Coleridge, David Cairns's Berlioz, Michael Holroyd's Shaw, Richardson's Picasso", whilst The New York Times Book Review describes his biography as a 'remarkable achievement', adding that 'there is nothing comparable to this study in any language'. The biography has been translated into German by Holger Fliessbach. The Goethe Institut awarded Boyle their Goethe Medal in 2000. The second volume was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize in 2001.