arly life and education Leighton Durham Reynolds was born on 11 February 1930 in the Welsh village of Abercanaid, south of Merthyr Tydfil. His father, Edgar Reynolds, was a civil servant working as a national health insurance clerk. The family of his mother, Hester Hale, had moved to Wales from the English county of Somerset in the previous generation. William Hale, his maternal grandfather, exerted a strong influence on Reynolds during his childhood; a coal miner by profession, he shared with Reynolds a passion for gardening, leading his grandson to join a society for natural history in Cardiff. Supported by the naturalists Bruce Campbell and A. E. Wade, he wrote his first publications on the birds of the Caerphilly Basin. Reynolds attended Caerphilly Grammar School and won a scholarship to study Modern languages at The Queen's College, Oxford. Due to a short-lived regulation stipulating that holders of state scholarships attend the institution nearest to their hometown, he did not take up his place, enrolling instead at University College Cardiff in 1947. Reynolds initially focussed on French and Italian and spent some time at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia in Italy. Influenced by the Latinist R. G. Austin, he increasingly turned to the study of Latin, culminating in the award of a first-class degree in 1950. With Austin's support, Reynolds went on to obtain a scholarship for a second undergraduate degree at St John's College, Cambridge. He completed the Classical Tripos, the Classics degree offered by the University of Cambridge, in two years instead of the usual three and received several awards for his performance, including a Craven Fellowship from the university. At St John's, he made the acquaintance of Bryan Peter Reardon, an expert on Ancient Greek novels, the Plato scholar Michael Stokes, and the Latinist John Patrick Sullivan. In 1952, after travelling to Greece, Reynolds began his national s ervice at the Royal Air Force, where most of his time was spent studying Russian in a programme introduced by the linguist Elizabeth Hill. After completing the course, he lodged with a Russian émigré in Paris to improve his fluency in spoken Russian. He left the air force after two years with the rank of pilot office