Classics) at Worcester College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree, first class, in 1976.

[4] His doctoral thesis, supervised by Sir Kenneth Dover, was titled "Personal jokes in Aristophanes".

[5] Halliwell taught at the universities of Oxford, London, Cambridge (where he was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College), and Birmingham.

Halliwell's characteristic style of tackling large issues of cultural significance through the fine-grained interpretation of texts led David Konstan, in reviewing Between Ecstasy and Truth, to call him ‘the ideal close reader’, whose arguments are ‘detailed, learned, and nuanced’.

[15] He has also made a number of appearances in broadcast media, including the BBC radio programme In Our Time.