Coming from a middle-class family in Reading, Page studied classics at Christ Church, Oxford, and served the college as a lecturer for most of the 1930s.

He spent the Second World War working on Ultra intelligence material at the Government Code & Cypher School based at Bletchley Park.

[1] He spent part of his childhood in South Wales but returned to Berkshire and became a student at Newbury Grammar School.

[1] Although Page came from a modest background compared to most of his peers, he settled in well at the college and made a number of friends, including the future Lord Chancellor Quintin Hogg and the Labour politician Patrick Gordon Walker.

[1] In 1931, Page was appointed a lecturer at Christ Church and became a Student (a full member of the college's governing body) the following year.

[4] Following in the footsteps of fellow Oxford classicist Edgar Lobel, he also worked on the poems of the archaic Greek lyric poets.

In 1936, he strongly opposed the candidacy of the Irish scholar E. R. Dodds for the Regius Chair of Greek which was hosted at Christ Church.

[1] Page's tenure at Oxford came to an abrupt end in 1950: the Regius Chair of Greek at Cambridge University had become vacant after the retirement of Donald Struan Robertson.

Page's arrival, together with that of the German Latinist Charles Brink, marked a reinvigoration of classical teaching at the university.

According to classicist Hugh Lloyd-Jones, his failure to obtain the office was a consequence of his staunch opposition to the students involved in the Garden House riot, a violent protest against the Greek military junta.

The couple led a quiet life in Northumberland where he continued his research, drawing on the library of the University of Newcastle.

[18] Although his work on tragedy has not garnered the same admiration from fellow classicists,[1][19] Page's edition of Euripides' Medea was considered "indispensable" by a reviewer for the Journal of Hellenic Studies.

[21] His focus lay narrowly on philological questions[16] and, according to Lloyd-Jones, he sometimes exhibited a tendency towards dogmatism when dealing with literary matters.