only just managed to return to England—on one of the last flights out of Bucharest—before the start of the Second World War. Second World War: Oxford and the Foreign Office In 1940, encouraged by economist Roy Harrod, Spencer-Churchill went to Oxford to study philosophy, although not as an undergraduate because of her lack of qualifications. While there she became associated with, among other leading academics, Isaiah Berlin and Maurice Bowra. Lady Antonia Fraser, whose father, later Lord Longford, was a fellow of Christ Church, described her as having been "the dons' delight". For a short while she was tutored by A. J. Ayer, a future Wykeham Professor of Logic known for his libidinous lifestyle, although his womanising was not apparently extended to her. When Spencer-Churchill moved back to London, she decoded ciphers in the communications department of the Foreign Office, where her future husband was the secretary of state from 1940 to 1945. One of her colleagues was Anthony Nutting, who in 1956 resigned from Anthony Eden's government because of his opposition to the Suez Operation. For a time the future Lady Avon lived in a roof-top room at the Dorchester Hotel, which she obtained at a cut-price rate because of its vulnerability to bombing (although the building was a modern, steel-framed structure with extensive underground accommodation that was considered relatively safe during air raids). Post-war After the war Spencer-Churchill worked at London Films for the producer Sir Alexander Korda, who she thought made "terrible mistakes without really knowing what has happened", and as a reviewer for the fashion magazine Vogue. She met the actor Orson Welles, who became a dining companion, on the set of the film The Third Man (1949), and escorted actress Paulette Goddard, who played Mrs. Cheverley in Korda's production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband (1947), on "a rather wild trip" to Brussels. During the latter excursion Goddard expressed a wish to attend a pornographic show, but, although Korda's representatives made arrangements for this, she shied away when she and Spencer-Churchill, having climbed "a flight of shabby stairs", were greeted by two men in black suits. Spencer-Churchill also worked for the short-lived monthly magazine Contact, established by George (later Lord) Weidenfeld and edited by Philip Toynbee. Weidenfeld was keen to expand into book publishing and Contact, which appeared with a hard cover, offered a means of circumventing post-war paper quotas. Among those Spencer-Churchill persuaded to