Tony Thorlby was the first Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex. He was educated at Tonbridge School and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read Modern Languages and was taught by the great Germanist Erich Heller. He then went to Yale, where in 1953, he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on ‘Fatality in Four Novels of the Nineteenth Century’.

He learned Russian during his National Service in the famous Joint Services School of Linguists, where Michael Frayn and Alan Bennett, as well as George Craig and Peter France, were also enrolled. D.M. Thomas, who was a contemporary, has written: “On my course the obvious leader—older, sophisticated, handsome, with a PhD,—a kind of admired Steerforth—was one A. K. Thorlby, later Tony.”