[7] At Oxford University, where Wilmers read modern languages at St Hugh's College from 1957,[8] she befriended Alan Bennett, later a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
Bennett said about Wilmers's time at university: "Outside the novels of Nancy Mitford or Evelyn Waugh, I had never come across anyone who behaved so confidently or in such a cosmopolitan fashion".
[9] For the week of her finals she moved into the Randolph Hotel, staying with her father whose presence was required due to her threat to not sit the exams.
[10] She left Faber aged 29 to become deputy editor of The Listener, edited by Karl Miller, and in the 1970s had a spell at The Times Literary Supplement (TLS).
[5] In 1979, Wilmers joined Miller in founding London Review of Books (LRB), conceived to fill a gap in the market as a year-long industrial dispute had closed The Times Literary Supplement.
[6] Her friend Hilary Mantel called Wilmers "a presiding genius", and Andrew O'Hagan explained: "She can’t bear a lazy sentence or secondhand metaphor.
[2] As an editor, Wilmers has been closely associated with the work of a number of novelists and essayists, including Alan Bennett, John Lanchester, Jenny Diski, Blake Morrison, Alan Hollinghurst, Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Craig Raine, Colm Tóibín, Stefan Collini, James Wood, Linda Colley, Jacqueline Rose, Paul Foot, Tariq Ali and Edward Luttwak.
In 2006, an article by academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt was criticised in some quarters for its claim that the foreign policy of the United States was in the grip of an "Israel lobby".
[13] An article by the Cambridge historian Mary Beard, published after the events of September 11, 2001, attracted some attention for suggesting that "America had it coming",[9] and when David Marquand, the political historian and principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, submitted a review praising Tony Blair's handling of the post-11 September period as "impeccable", Wilmers replied saying, "I can't square it with my conscience to praise so wholeheartedly Blair's conduct" and pulled the piece.