She attended West Heath Girls' School in Kent, and then gained a first-class degree in classics at the University of Liverpool, followed by doctoral studies in comparative philology at Somerville College, Oxford.
Her television work, from 1956 onwards, included documentaries on Queen Victoria, Byron and Nelson.
[2] She published books on topics including slimming, Louis Pasteur, insects, the Empress Matilda and George III, and at the time of her death was working on The Price of Freedom, "seeking to explain why England had never suffered from tyranny".
[1] She has been described as "cultural translator", "an individual who expresses the essence of entanglement in their career choices, moving between genres, media, or nations".
[3] Paine's obituary in The Independent described her as "a woman of the Nineties in the Fifties",[2] and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes how: "In her final years, when confined to bed after a fall, she kept her mind active by learning English and Latin poetry and reading the newspapers every morning".