By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press Writer

LONDON

Sir Kenneth Dover, a distinguished historian of Greek culture who gained wider fame by admitting his wish to kill a troublesome colleague, has died at 89.

Dover died Sunday in a hospital in Cupar, Scotland, St Andrews University announced Tuesday, without disclosing the cause of death.

Dover shockingly admitted his loathing for Trevor Aston, a fellow historian at Corpus Christi College in Oxford University, in his 1994 autobiography, "Marginal Comment." Aston, according to Dover, had become an embarrassment because of his drunken and irrational behavior.

"It was clear to me that Trevor and the college must somehow be separated, and my problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candor: how to kill him without getting into trouble," wrote Dover, who was president of Corpus Christi at the time of Aston's death.

Aston died from a drug overdose in October 1985 on the day he was notified of divorce proceedings by his second wife, and several days after a heated confrontation with Dover. There was no evidence that Dover had any role in the death.

Would Dover have tried to kill Aston had he not committed suicide?

"Oh no, no no," Dover told The Associated Press in 1994.

"Well, I think it just wasn't practicable," he said.

Dover confessed a feeling of relief when Aston died, and he also shocked some readers of his 1994 book by including details of his own sex life.

"But even if his judgment of tone in respect of the latter was naive, Dover had taken a principled decision to write autobiography in a confessional mode, one of the oldest traditions of the genre, and he thought that some reactions to his book ostensibly preferred hypocrisy to truthful handling of one's feelings and experiences," said Stephen Halliwell, head of the School of Classics at St Andrews.

In a brilliant academic career capped by his 1978 election as president of the Royal Academy, Dover caused ripples with candid work on sexuality.

His 1968 commentary on Aristophanes' play "Clouds" elucidated the sexual jokes in the text.

Ten years later, he produced "Greek Homosexuality" in which his liberal attitude was ahead of the times.

"No argument which purports to show that homosexuality in general is natural or unnatural, healthy or morbid, legal or illegal, in conformity with God's will or contrary to it, tells me whether any particular homosexual act is morally right or morally wrong," Dover wrote.

"No act is sanctified, and none is debased, simply by having a genital dimension."