is a British novelist, short story writer, critic, literary theorist, and playwright. He was born in Nice, France, of Sephardic, Egyptian-Jewish parents, who lived out the war years in a village in the French Alps. After studying for six years in Egypt at Victoria College, Cairo from 1950-56, on emigrating with his mother to England in that year, he finished his high school education at Cheltenham College, Gloucestershire. He obtained his B.A. from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1961. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize for his fiction in 1975. He taught at the University of Sussex at Brighton from 1963 until 1998, where he is Research Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities.