A humane and learned scholar of European literature and culture and a brilliant prize-winning literary critic, Malcolm Bowie was one of this country’s most distinguished professors of French for the better part of 30 years.

Elected Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 2002, he was obliged by ill-health to relinquish this role at the end of last year, having contributed significantly to the college’s fundraising and having played a distinguished part in its quincentenary celebrations and its academic life.

His many ground-breaking publications, his multiple editorial and institutional roles and his outstanding energy as a graduate supervisor constitute perhaps the greatest individual contribution to the substance and vitality of French studies in British universities. Yet he was gloriously lacking in self-importance, and the death of this kind and civilised man is keenly mourned by colleagues the world over who regarded him as a mentor and a friend.

Malcolm McNaughtan Bowie was born in 1943 in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, a fitting birthplace for a man who loved music with such intimacy. He was educated at nearby Woodbridge School and at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied French and English and, after a year abroad at the Université de Caen, graduated with a First in 1965.

He then moved to the newly established University of Sussex, and for two years worked under the supervision of Christophe Campos on a doctoral thesis about the Belgian-born poet, writer and painter, Henri Michaux (1899-1984). Completed in 1970, this was published in revised form by the Clarendon Press in 1973 and received warm reviews.

After two years as assistant lecturer in European studies at the University of East Anglia (1967-69), he moved to Cambridge and into orbit around those twin stars, Lloyd Austin, Drapers Professor of French, and Alison Fairlie, Fellow of Girton.

The encouragement of Austin, the doyen of Mallarmé scholars and heroic editor of his correspondence, further stimulated Bowie in his passionate admiration for this poet, and his second book, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, appeared in 1978. It remains a lucid and subtle reading of this demanding writer, and the elegance of the prose and the acuity of the insights serve almost to remove the irony from its witty epigraph: “Cara semplicità, quanto mi piaci!” (from Così fan tutte).

The equally eminent Fairlie not only helped with the book but also hatched, among her illustrious “Girton girls”, a pioneering textual scholar of Proust, Alison Finch, whom Bowie was to marry in 1979. Theirs was a marriage made in secular heaven, secured by common interests and a commitment to the progressive. It helped, of course, that Malcolm was a “new man” long before that creature had been invented: “a committed feminist in word and deed”, as Alison put it in a book acknowledgement.

As a university lecturer at Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College, Bowie was an energetic, innovative member of the French department before he left — after a mere septennium and at the ridiculous age of 33 — to become Professor at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, in 1976. There, after an inaugural lecture on Proust, he remained — despite widespread expectation that he would succeed Austin in the Drapers Chair at Cambridge and despite the commuting occasioned by Alison’s lectureship in the Cambridge French department. But in 1992 he did leave, to take up the Marshal Foch chair of French Literature at Oxford and a professorial fellowship at All Souls. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy the following year.

At Queen Mary he threw himself into the life of the department and served as its head for 13 years before becoming the founding director of the Institute of Romance Studies in the University of London. At the same time his influence and reputation grew rapidly, nationally and internationally.

He was an active member of the Association of University Professors of French (president, 1982-84). He sat on the executive committee of the Society of French Studies for over a decade (president, 1994-96). With almost no secretarial assistance he served as general editor of French Studies, the society’s journal (1980-87). In 1980 he persuaded Cambridge University Press to launch a monographs series, the Cambridge Studies in French. He was its general editor (until its highly regrettable discontinuance in 1995), and he made it a byword for excellence by commissioning many talented (and mostly young) scholars of French in the UK and the US.

Recruitment was aided by visiting professorships: first at Berkeley (1983), and then as Visiting Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Centre in New York (1989). For comparative literature studies were also among his interests, and later, in 1998, he would become president of the British Comparative Literature Association. He firmly disparaged the professional tendency to isolate French literature from the study of other literatures. Similarly, he championed all attempts to study literature in relation to other arts, particularly music and painting, about which he was extremely — and modestly — knowledgeable. Witness, for example, his elegant and learned programme notes for Covent Garden.

At Queen Mary he also developed his interest in psychoanalysis, producing papers, articles and books that are at once learnedly theoretical, exegetically lucid and firmly grounded in his experience of life and his love of literature: Freud, Proust and Lacan. Theory as Fiction (1987); Lacan(1991); and Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory (1993). “Theory-tinged literary criticism” he called it, but good enough to merit invitations to lecture to the British Psychoanalytical Society and the Tavistock Clinic.

It was no surprise that his second inaugural lecture, at Oxford in 1993, should have been devoted, like his first, to Proust, nor that finally in 1998 there appeared the book that he had been mulling over for at least two decades: Proust Among the Stars. It won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2001 and brought its author well-deserved prestige and a cheque for $50,000.

The book is quite beautifully written. It also liberates potential readers and rereaders of Proust from the anxiety of having to read “the whole thing” by showing how to savour À la recherche du temps perdu at the micro level: focusing on particular passages and exploring the great themes (time, sex, art, death) by teasing out nuance and ambiguity with subtle delicacy.

During his ten years as Marshal Foch Professor of French he put his shoulder stoutly to the Oxford wheel: as graduate supervisor, as jobbing examiner, and as codirector, then director, of the European Humanities Research Centre, where he helped to launch and foster its new imprint, Legenda. One year after his move Alison became a Fellow of Jesus (fixed-term) and Merton (tenured), and it looked as though the Bowie-Finch combo had been wrested from the arms of Cambridge unto eternity. But the call from Christ’s was irresistible. Bowie had enjoyed the company at Oxford, even as his morale was sapped by the remorseless committee work and the university’s mean-spirited frustration of his efforts with the EHRC. Nevertheless, having contributed handsomely to Oxford French’s top ratings in the research assessment exercises of 1996 and 2001, he relished the challenge of becoming a head of house and following in the footsteps of the great J. H. Plumb, Christ’s previous Master but two.

To the challenge he rose — until September 2004 when an incurable form of cancer, multiple myeloma, was diagnosed. He had long known back pain — sometimes it required him to spend meetings flat on the floor — but now the pain had another, sinister source. After treatment he achieved his immediate target: to lead his college during its quincentenary celebrations in 2005.

Already during his chemo-therapy he had been driven to the steps of Guildhall in London, like royalty, to preside over the grandest of college reunions. And in June he was well enough to meet royalty itself when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh came to Christ’s for tea. At heart still a child of the Swinging Sixties, the Master — in gown and now alas in temporary wig — greeted his sovereign with a respectful if rather republican gaze.

At the end of 2005, a one-day conference on “Why Art Matters” was held at Clare Hall, Cambridge, orchestrated by Gillian Beer and Beate Perrey as a day of homage to Bowie, to art and especially to life.

The Master’s paper was vintage Bowie. Entitled The Fate of Pleasure: An Update, it was a declaration, at once heartfelt and reasoned, that the Villa Val-marana ai Nani (a short walk from La Rotonda, outside Vice-nza) was the speaker’s favour-ite place in all the world, an interdisciplinary locus amoenus comprising fine architecture and the celebrated Tiepolo frescoes that depict fleshly scenes from classical literature.

Here spoke the man who was vegetarian for the reason that “if humankind is capable of producing Haydn’s string quartets, it can surely manage not to eat animals”. Three weeks before his death and knowing that he should not risk the infections of a crowd, he made a point of visiting the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery. More than anyone, he understood why Proust and his fictional creation, the novelist Bergotte, had, at the last, been so determined to see an exhibition of Vermeer.

Bowie is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.

Professor Malcolm Bowie, Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, 2002-06, was born on May 5, 1943. He died on January 28, 2007, aged 63