PROFESSOR Alan Raitt, one of the most distinguished scholars of 19th century French literature, has died aged 75.

Alan William Raitt was born in Morpeth, Northumberland, in 1930, and began studying modern languages at Magdalen College in 1948.

While an undergraduate, he won the Heath Harrison prize, the most prestigious for languages, in both French and German in consecutive years.

In the Oxford faculty's handbook, the list of staff and their specialisms was a detailed affair, listing individual authors or movements, periods and genres. Besides Alan Raitt's name it simply read: "The 19th century".

He knew the period from all angles, and was as comfortable supervising research on Chateaubriand as on avant-garde theatre.

Prof Raitt was as capable of guiding a student through a doctorate on Stendhal and Italy as through a thesis on the occult.

After graduating with a first in 1951, he began a DPhil under the supervision of Austin Gill. His thesis, completed five years later, became his first book, Villiers de I'Isle-Adam et le mouvement symboliste.

He was a Fellow of Magdalen from 1953 to 1955, after which he moved to Exeter College as Fellow and Lecturer in French.

He remained there for 11 years, and was the college's sub-rector between 1953 and 1959.

In 1966, he succeeded Mr Gill as Fellow in French at Magdalen, he was made Reader in 1979 and given a personal chair in 1992.

In 1998, the Clarendon Press published The Process of Art, a book of essays in his honour, with essays by students and friends, among them novelist Julian Barnes, a former student with whom Raitt shared his fascination with Flaubert.

When he retired from Magdalen in 1997, he continued to write and take an active part in intellectual life.

Prof Raitt, who lived in North Oxford, held a season ticket at Oxford United and went to most home matches.

He also took a recent interest in Chelsea FC, because the team's manager Jos Mourinho, shared his nationality with Raitt's wife Lia, a Portuguese scholar whom he married in 1974.

Put in charge of entertaining a visiting Soviet academic and his KGB minder, he took him to an Oxford United game.

He was a discriminating football analyst. His critical appraisals extended, sometimes bluntly, to the referees.

Prof Raitt was also a fan of detective fiction.

When one of his students expressed an interest in the poet Ezra Pound, Prof Raitt directed him to Elmore Leonard's Pronto, in which a minor Mafia money launderer, on the run from his bosses, returns to Italy on the trail of Pound, whose prison cage he had once guarded in a Pisan war camp.

The professor was full of such unexpected connections, which made learning pleasurable.

He was immensely proud of his daughters by his first marriage to Janet Taylor, Suzanne, a literary critic, and Claire, a lawyer.

Prof Raitt was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1971, and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992.

In 1987, he was awarded the Grand Prix du Rayonnement de la langue francaise from the Acadmie Francaise and made Officier de l'Ordre des Palmes Acadmiques, in which he was promoted to Commandeur in 1995.