I'm of German / Irish ancestry, was brought up on Dartmoor and spent the first ten years of my life in a house adjoining a large Mental Asylum where my father was the superintendent psychiatrist. Educated at a convent and Dartington Hall School, my first degree was at Trinity College Dublin where I read Modern History and Political Science; twenty-five years later I took a second MA at RHBNC, London, in Women's History, Gender and Society. I have been a teacher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and broadcaster and worked for OUP in Hong Kong for five years. Subsequently I trained as a psychoanalyst at the CG Jung Institute in Zürich. I've travelled extensively and have adult grandchildren.
"Life," wrote Arthur Schopenhauer, "can be compared to a piece of embroidery of which, during the first half of his time, man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together." I now enjoy contemplating the warp and weft of my years.