Woman with a sense of history

Mary Warnock is perhaps best known for her work with the controversial Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and as a scholar who has written extensively on philosophy, ethics and education. This memoir is an evocation of the people and places which most influenced her. It is an insider view of a British upperclass world of academia, particularly the heyday of Oxford, which she describes as being the philosophical centre of the world after the end of the second World War. While some of the people in the book are portrayed with affection and great understanding, she also delivers extremely trenchant criticisms.

It is typical of her style that she dismisses at once the idea that she might have had an unhappy childhood, although she was born seven months after her father's tragically early death, and her mother made it plain to her she would have much preferred a boy. Warnock says drily that far from affecting her, she was amazed that anyone would have the poor taste not to be delighted to have her as a child. Her emotional security in the family stemmed from a beloved Nanny who went on to help Warnock raise her own children.

Warnock places great store on those with whom she "got on", and women friends played a central role in her life, including her great friend Imogen Wrong. Her marriage to Geoffrey Warnock, who was later to become Vice Chancellor of Oxford University, was obviously a happy one, but is described in somewhat oblique terms. The reader is allowed to draw his or own conclusions from the picture she paints of a disorganised, somewhat chaotic household with two people who had high-flown academic careers at a time when such a partnership was a rarity. They were supportive of each other, to the extent that they sometimes taught each other's classes. This enabled Warnock to carry on working despite having three children in quick succession at a time when maternity leave was unheard of. Indeed, even the idea of married female academics was somewhat of a scandal.

She provides many insights, often infused with a dry wit, into the characters of such luminaries as A.J. Ayers, Iris Murdoch and Isaiah Berlin. It is interesting to see her own development as a philosopher and as an ethicist, and the role played by those who most influenced her, including Phillipa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Rachel Trickett. Warnock describes herself as a natural Tory, who became intellectually convinced of the value of socialism but eventually reverted to voting Conservative.

She reserves her greatest spleen for Margaret Thatcher. Despite denying that her dislike was motivated by snobbery, it is obvious that Warnock despised Thatcher for her shrill vulgarity, her "candy-floss hair and electric blue suits", which endeared her to so many drooling males. But in Warnock's eyes, Thatcher's greatest crimes were the demolition job which she started on the universities, and a spirit of "cold selfishness" which Warnock believes still has not dissipated. Tony Blair, however, is treated even more dismissively, as a man who has no sense of history, who is in thrall to spin-doctors and who abandoned the working classes without a backward look.

At times the narrative flags or becomes bitty, yet ultimately this book provides a fascinating glimpse of a time and place where people thrived on intellectual discussion and ideas were valuable in their own right. Perhaps that is why she is so unforgiving of Thatcher and Blair - because she believes both of them, in different ways, have contributed to an anti-intellectual spirit of cynicism which she deplores.

Breda O'Brien is an Irish Times columnist and a teacher