[1] She received her advanced education at Harvard University followed by Somerville College, Oxford and a PhD at the Warburg Institute for which David Starkey was one of the examiners and which was published in volume III of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain[2][3] as "Press, politics and religion".

While at Maggs she discovered the printer Manuzio's copy of the first Latin translation of five mathematical treatises of Archimedes by Commandinus, an important document of the Renaissance that had been overlooked by the firm for 60 years.

[2] Her first sole-authored book was Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman (1997) which her obituary writer in The Times thought appropriate to the author and the subject.

The book examined the relationship between Fanny and her son Anthony Trollope in detail and shed new light on it.

[2] In 1987, she married David Sington, a documentary filmmaker who worked for the BBC, with whom she collaborated on a book on the influence of utopian thought.