Artemis Cooper studied English at Oxford, and worked in Egypt and New Mexico before beginning her career as a writer. Her first book, A Durable Fire (1983) was an edition of the correspondence between her grandparents, Duff and Diana Cooper. This was followed by Cairo in the War: 1939-1945 (1989), and Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch, the letters of Diana Cooper and Evelyn Waugh. In Watching in the Dark, A Child’s Fight for Life (1992), she described her small daughter’s sudden illness and almost miraculous recovery. With her husband, the military historian Antony Beevor, she co-authored Paris After the Liberation: 1945-1949 (1994). She has written three biographies. Writing at the Kitchen Table (1999) told the life of the cookery writer Elizabeth David. Her next was Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (2012), and lastly Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence (2016).