Did she, like the Mitford sisters, feel cheated of a formal university education? "From the age of 16 I did feel very much cheated, mainly because I wasn't well taught. I didn't take the school certificate because I was so bored. None of my female contemporaries got to university at all. Not one." Although she didn't take a degree, she studied at Oxford in the 1930s and was, according to Antonia Fraser, "the dons' delight, because she was beautiful and extremely intellectual". She was quite the bohemian, too, wearing suits in the style of Marlene Dietrich. But the impending war meant there was an air of menace, as well as frivolity. "I knew for certain that there would be a war, because of my uncle. He had been prognosticating throughout the Thirties. I knew because he knew, so to speak. The people who didn't want to know believed in Chamberlain."