mother, Bettina Kohr, who married George Brown in 1948, was an executive assistant to Laurence Olivier on his first two Shakespeare films. Bettina was of part Iraqi descent; Tina recounted, "She was dark and I never knew why." In Brown's own words she was considered "an extremely subversive influence" as a child, resulting in her expulsion from three boarding schools. Offences included organising a demonstration to protest against the school's policy of allowing a change of underwear only three times a week, referring to her headmistress's bosoms as "unidentified flying objects" in a journal entry, and writing a play about her school being blown up and a public lavatory being erected in its place. Brown entered the University of Oxford at the age of 17. She studied at St Anne's College, and graduated with a BA in English Literature. As an undergraduate, she wrote for Isis, the university's literary magazine, to which she contributed interviews with the journalist Auberon Waugh and the actor Dudley Moore. Brown wrote for the New Statesman while she was still an undergraduate at Oxford. An invitation by Waugh to a Private Eye lunch she wrote up irreverently caught the eye of the editor of The New Statesman Anthony Howard and he offered her an Oxford column. While still at Oxford, she won The Sunday Times National Student Drama Award for her one-act play Under the Bamboo Tree which was performed at the Bush Theatre and The Edinburgh Festival. A subsequent play, Happy Yellow, in 1977 was mounted at the London fringe Bush Theatre and was later performed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Personal life In 1973, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh introduced Brown's writings to Harold Evans, editor of The Sunday Times, and in 1974 she was given freelance assignments in the UK by Ian Jack, the paper's features editor, and in the US by its colour magazine, edited by Godfrey Smith. When a relationship developed between Brown and Evans, she resigned to write for the rival The Sunday Telegraph. Evans divorced in 1978 and, on 20 August 1981, he and Brown married at Grey Gardens, the East Hampton, New York, home of The Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. They lived together in New York City until Evans' death on 23 September 2020. They had two children: a son, Georgie, born in 1986, and a daughter, Isabel, born in