Geoffrey Lewis was born in London in 1920 and educated at St John's College, Oxford. After five years in the R.A.F. during the Second World War, mainly in Egypt and Libya, he returned to Oxford to read Arabic and Persian. He taught himself Turkish and was awarded a doctorate in Islamic philososphy in 1950. He became lecturer in Turkish at Oxford in the same year, and later became a Fellow of St Anthony's College. Geoffrey Lewis died in 2008 at the age of 87.
