Ann Lambton, known as Nancy to her friends, devoted the greater part of her life to Iran and the study of Iran. Iranians who knew her thought she was either a saint, a scholar, a spy or all three. She was tough, physically and mentally, and almost an ascetic. She was a walker, a climber, a horsewoman and a squash player. She was a scholar who wrote some of the standard works on Iranian language, agriculture, land tenure and history. She was involved in some of the most dramatic of 20th-century Iranian political events. She was a devout Christian.

Lambton was the second child of the Hon George Lambton, fifth son of the 2nd Earl of Durham; and of Cecily, daughter of Sir John Horner. Her father trained racehorses, including George V’s, at Newmarket, and she was a good horsewoman herself. Her mother did not believe in education and kept her at home. She had almost no formal schooling and spent her youth in her father’s stables until she became too tall to be a jockey (a younger sister, Sybil, died in a riding accident in 1961).

At 16, Lambton later told a friend, she read T. E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert and became fascinated by the idea of travel in Arabia. She later met Denison Ross, the orientalist and director of the School of Oriental Studies (later the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS, of London University), who encouraged her to study at the school. She enrolled in 1932 as a student not registered for a degree course. Ross persuaded her to concentrate on Persian rather than on the Arab world, and she later registered for an honours degree course in Persian with subsidiary Arabic.....