John Derek Latham (he always used Derek as his first name) was born in South Lancashire on 8 April 1927 and cherished the area of Manchester, Wigan and Cheshire for the whole of his life, continuing to live there even during his tenure as Professor in Edinburgh. But he was also devoted to the University of Oxford, a connection that began in his undergraduate days. He graduated in 1949 with double honours in Classical Moderations (Mods) and Oriental Studies (Arabic and Persian, first class). That combination set the tone for his future as a scholar in more ways than one. He maintained a lively interest in Latin in particular, for from 1970 he served as etymological consultant and contributor to the British Academy's Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources and wrote extensively on the interface between Arabic and Latin. He obviously planned to produce a comprehensive list of medieval Latin words of Arabic origin, and the published torso of that project, which covers the letters A to L, runs to sixty-six printed pages in four journal articles, with the last instalment published five years before his death.

From 1984 onwards he was a specialist consultant to the Oxford English dictionaries. He held a brief appointment at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he was Curator of Middle East Collections and Associate Professor, from 1957 to 1958, and he served as Chairman both for the Middle East Libraries Committee and for the British Academy's Sources of African History Committee (both from 1971 to 1979). Altogether, then, he was a born librarian, lexicographer and bibliographer (as witnessed in the latter case by his splendid work in collating the publications of the great Samuel Stern in Harvey's 1974 edition of Stern's work on Hispano-Arabic poetry).

Alongside the pursuit of his specialised research interests (see below), Derek Latham rendered sterling service to the field of Islamic studies in a number of ways. Between 1983 and 1991 he was involved in three volumes of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature in several capacities: member of the editorial board, co-editor and contributor (‘Religion, learning and science in the ‘Abbasid period’; ‘‘Abbasid belles-lettres’; and ‘Modern Arabic literature’).