 As an academic he is known for his work on German literature specialising in the Age of Goethe, Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism with contributions on figures such as Goethe, Hölderlin, and Kafka.He was born in London in 1947, the son of poet and Holocaust survivor H. G. Adler, and was educated at St Marylebone Grammar School (1958–1966) and Queen Mary College London (1966–1969), where he graduated with a first class degree in German with English.He studied for a PhD at Westfield College London, obtaining his degree in 1978 with a thesis on the chemistry of German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe's "Elective Affinities" under Claus Bock.