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I am an 18^th century French scholar and author of a study of Universal Languages Schemes in England and France 1600-1800 (Toronto University Press: Toronto, 1975). 

I co-founded the Journal of Beckett Studies with the publisher, John Calder in 1976 and, with John Pilling, was its first co-editor. I was general editor of the four volumes of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett with Faber and Faber and Grove Press and edited two of its volumes, Waiting for Godot (1993) and Krapp's Last Tape (1992), which appeared recently in colour paperback in English with Faber and Grove Press and in Italian with Cue Press.

I was a friend of Samuel Beckett for nineteen years and became, in Beckett’s words, his ‘sole authorised biographer’, publishing in 1996 Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett with Bloomsbury Publishing in London and Simon and Schuster in New York. The biography was short-listed in the UK for the Whitbread Biography of the Year award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and it won the Southern Arts Non-Fiction Prize in 1996. It also won the ‘George Freedley Memorial Award for an Outstanding Contribution to the Literature of the Theatre’ in the USA and has been translated into most European languages, more recently Slovak and Portuguese, as well as into Japanese, Chinese, and, shortly, Korean.

I have written or edited many other books and essays on Beckett and on modern European drama, including Images of Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) with the British theatre photographer, John Haynes and Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 2006) with my wife, Dr. Elizabeth I. I have also written many articles for The Scotsman, The Glasgow Herald, History Today and, more recently, The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, The Journal of Beckett Studies..

I have broadcast many times on the radio and television in England, France, Germany, the USA and Canada and appeared in German, French and British films about Beckett, including Adrian Dunbar’s BBC film on Beckett in 2019-20 and have been a literary consultant or adviser on major theatre productions of Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tape. Over the past eight years, I have published many articles and interviews in the Samuel Beckett Society website, ‘The Beckett Circle’ now The Beckett Review. 

I retired from the University in 1998. I am currently completing a sequel to the Beckett biography and personal memoir entitled ‘The Search for Sam: a Journey with and around Samuel Beckett’.