[3] Her father Archibald Edward Wilson (1875–1923) was a housemaster and German teacher at Winchester College who died from diphtheria seven months before her birth.

She never knew her eldest brother, Malcolm (1907–1969), who had autism and was cared for in a nursing home, spending his last days in a Dorset hospital.

Her other brother, Duncan Wilson (1911–1983), was a British diplomat who became Ambassador to the Soviet Union before taking up an appointment as master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

[3][5] Warnock said that when she was a child she was embarrassed by her mother, who looked different from most people, often by wearing long flowing dark red clothes and walking with turned out feet.

[5] The family's inherited wealth offered Warnock a privileged education; starting in 1942 she studied classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

[8] She retired in 1992, but continued to serve on public committees and to write and edit books, including The Uses of Philosophy (1992), Imagination and Time (1994) and An Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics (1998).

[12] In the early 1960s, whilst still teaching at St Hugh's College, Warnock took a seat on the Oxfordshire Local Education Authority.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she wrote a column for the Times Educational Supplement, as well as a pamphlet "Universities: Knowing Our Minds", and gave the Richard Dimbleby Lecture in 1985 on the topic, "Teacher Teach Thyself".

Warnock subsequently expressed dissatisfaction with the system that she helped to create, calling it "appalling" because of the expense of its administration and its tendency to deny support to mildly disadvantaged children.

According to Dame Susan Leather, a former chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, "perhaps the greatest achievement of the Warnock committee is that it managed to get an ethical consensus that people understood as well as shared".

[3] From 1984 to 1989, Warnock chaired a Home Office Committee on animal experimentation; she was a member of the Government advisory panel on spoliation from 1998.

[13] In 2008, Warnock, a committed advocate of euthanasia, caused controversy with an opinion that people with dementia should be allowed to elect to die if they felt they were "a burden to their family or the state".

[17] Warnock was the President of Listening Books, a charity providing audiobooks for people who struggle to read due to an illness, disability, learning difficulty or mental health issue.