[4] She was educated at Richmond Convent, North Yorkshire, and Brighton, Hove & Sussex VI Form College, followed by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and then Harvard University, where Bunting read history, and received a Knox postgraduate fellowship to study politics and to teach.
Bunting was appointed director of the London-based think tank Demos in June 2006 but resigned shortly after, owing to differences with the trustees.
[5] Her first book The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule, published in 1995, was praised as "thoroughly unflinching, fair-minded, humane and sensitive" (Paul Johnson, Evening Standard).
Another review by the historian Norman Stone said, "Bunting is a superb chronicler of what happened.. if you want a classic example of the dilemmas of Resistance, here it is."
Yet the book was also highly controversial[7] in that the author accused the islanders of passive collaboration with German occupying forces, implying that officials "helped identify Jews" for deportation to their deaths, which constituted a "shameful wartime past".
As a columnist Bunting wrote on a wide range of subjects from religion to politics, social change and global development.
She was well known for opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, she played a key role in drawing new voices into the media from the British Muslim community and won a Commission for Racial Equality award for her work in this area.
She was also known for her advocacy of religious belief from a liberal position and her rejection of atheism; she argues that new atheists' antipathy to religion makes it impossible for them to criticise it effectively.