Nicholas Boyle

Nicholas Boyle FBA (born 18 June 1946) is an English literary critic. He is the emeritus 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 (of which two of a projected three volumes have been published). Boyle became a fellow of the British Academy in 2000.

Life and work Boyle was educated at King's School, Worcester, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was awarded BA and PhD degrees. He was a research fellow at Magdalene from 1968 to 1972, before becoming respectively an assistant lecturer, lecturer, and reader in German at the University of Cambridge between 1972 and 2000. He was head of the German department at Cambridge between 1996 and 2001.

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.

He lives in Cambridge with his wife and four children.

Financial Times letter In 2017, one of Boyle's letters to the Financial Times went viral. In the letter, Boyle responded to a Big Read article ("Braced for the fall") published on 5 July 2017. In the article, it was stated that the pro-Brexit wing of the Conservative Party are to be known as 'fuckers', while their opponents are to be known as 'wankers'. Boyle opined that "this rhetoric inverts the truth", as "it is the Europhobes who shut themselves away in self-gratifying fantasies, while the Remainers know that real life is possible only through interaction with others".

Boyle's letter was described as outstanding and the "letter of the decade" by editor Lionel Barber, and was shared across multiple online platforms.