Dorothy Bassett was born in Wolverhampton in 1892 and later attended Birmingham University between 1911 and 1913 where she trained as a primary school teacher. She was married in 1915 in Birmingham. June her daughter was born in 1918 and in 1921 the family moved to Burma and then India and Singapore where her husband had secured a job designing and building bridges. In the early 1930s they returned to England but fell victim to the depression. It was then that the events described in this book took place. In 1941 she became the Personal Assistant to the Director of the British Council in Buenos Aires, Sir Eugen Millington-Drake, organising and travelling extensively on lecture tours. At the end of World War 2, she and June returned to England where Dorothy secured a job with the Oxford University Press establishing the Foreign Translation Department. On her retirement she undertook the complex task indexing versions of the important work 'A Study of History' by Arnold Toynbee.