After a nomadic early education in six different schools, he obtained a scholarship to Charterhouse, where, despite an indifferent academic culture, he excelled in mathematics, and learned Italian from Wilfrid Noyce.
On obtaining another scholarship to King's College, Cambridge he came under the influence of the pre-Socratics specialist John Raven.
A keen interest in anthropology informed his reading of ancient Greek philosophy, and his doctoral studies, conducted under the supervision of Geoffrey Kirk, focused on patterns of polarity and analogy in Greek thought, a thesis which, revised, was eventually published in 1966.
On his return to Cambridge in 1960, a chance conversation with Edmund Leach stimulated him to read deeply in the emerging approach of structural anthropology being formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
In 2013 he received the Dann David Prize in recognition of his innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms.