Her father, Philip, was a lithographic printer, and her mother, Ellen, ran a boarding house in Brixton; Kathleen was their third daughter.
The scholarship was in English Literature, but on arriving at Oxford, Nott switched to Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in which she took a IVth in 1929.
The reviewer felt that there was "something a shade clinical, a trifle too scientifically tolerant or indulgent, in the view of humanity unfolded here", and found Nott's prose "sharply individual but perhaps a little too mannered in its intellectual precision."
The reviewer concluded that it was "an admirably balanced story, which gains in narrative force and even in warmth as it advances.
"[3] Nott's debut collection of poetry, Landscapes and Departures (1947) received a positive review in the Times Literary Supplement.
Nott was a committed humanist and rationalist, as signalled by the publication of her controversial The Emperor's New Clothes (1953), Writing on the occasion of Nott's death, a National Secular Society's former general secretary, Colin McCall, explained the significance of the book:
Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers were, in their different ways, spreading dogmatic Christian orthodoxy; and when the Times Literary Supplement (January 22, 1954) said the acceptance of authority in matters of religious belief "is now once more an important constituent in European letters".
", Nott wrote: To be too analytical, to demand explanations, reasons, and logical or moral justifications can, we know, destroy human trust and therefore human relations... Safeguarding, the longing for final reassurance characterises all of us, rationalists and religious alike, and the prestige of objective truth is only an intellectual parallel...
It looks as if some kinds of argument, whatever they appear to be about, can indeed be largely sterile because they are not really aimed at finding a synthesis, a solution, at making peace.
For Nott, rationalism "in the nineteenth-century dyed-in-the-wool sense of being almost wholly preoccupied with the question of the existence of God, and with rebutting any supernatural sanction for morality", is "sterile".
She also admitted that "as soon as I begin to write about Humanism or speak from a Humanist platform I find myself in full retreat towards square nought.
All they seriously worry about is the mid-Victorian controversy and it is here that they seem irremovably stuck... the large mass of contemporary literature has made at least one thing clear: that on the subject of God's existence and of the supernatural there is no longer any possibility of reasoned communication.
"[12] She continued: The job for the humanist is to try and extract the human values of religion, to separate them out from the theological languages in which they disguise themselves.