Walter Horace Bruford was born in Manchester in 1894. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and then he studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, and also at the University of Zuerich, Switzerland. During the First World War he served with the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty. After the war he did some research at Zuerich and then in 1920 became a Lecturer in German at Aberdeen University, and then Reader in 1923. Bruford was then Professor of German at Edinburgh University, 1929-1951, though was seconded to the Foreign Office, 1939-1943. From 1951 he was Professor of German at the University of Cambridge until 1961. His publications includeSound and symbolwith Professor J. J. Findlay,Germany in the eighteenth century,Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der Goethezeit,Chekhov and his Russia, andLiterary interpretation in Germanyand much more. He had lived at Abbey-St. Bathans, Duns, Berwickshire. Professor Walter Horace Bruford died in 1988.