An Oxford scholar who devoted his life to the works of the Czech writer Franz Kafka has died.

Sir Malcolm Pasley, who was for 28 years tutor in German,and a Fellow of Magdalen College, was 77.

After being educated at Sherborne School and serving in the Royal Navy from 1944 to 1946, he went to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1947 and graduated with a first in modern languages in 1949.

He was Laming Travelling Fellow at Queen's College, Oxford, in the same year, and in 1950 began his long teaching career at the university, when he was appointed lecturer in German at Brasenose and Magdalen colleges. In 1958, he became a Fellow of Magdalen College, which he served as tutor in German until his retirement in 1986, after which he became Emeritus Fellow.

During his career, he taught and wrote on a number of German authors, but it was above all as a Kafka scholar that he was noted, producing many articles and a definitive critical edition on the author.

It was on his initiative that Kafka's surviving relatives agreed to make the writer's manuscripts available to scholars and to transfer them to the Bodleian Library.

Sir Malcolm received many academic honours, and was elected to the German Academy of Language and Literature in 1983 and to the British Academy in 1991. He became a baronet on the death of his father in 1982.

He is survived by his wife Virginia and their two sons, of whom Robert, born in 1965, succeeds in the baronetcy.