Daiches, David (1912–2005)

Scottish literary critic and scholar. His works include Critical Approaches to Literature (1956), The Paradox of Scottish Culture (1964), and Literature and Western Civilization (1973). He wrote studies of Virginia Woolf (1942), R L Stevenson (1947), Robert Burns (1950), Willa Cather (1951), Walter Scott (1971), and Charles Edward Stuart (1973).

Born in Sunderland and educated at Edinburgh University and Balliol College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow, Daiches was a lecturer at Chicago University 1937–43, second secretary to the British embassy in Washington, DC, 1943–46, and professor of English at Cornell, Ithaca, New York, 1946–51. He then returned to England to lecture at Cambridge. He became professor of English at Sussex University in 1961. He later wrote guides to British cultural monuments.