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Marista Leishman grew up in the dramatic and awkward household of Sir John Reith, where she learned a solitary self-reliance that helped her to maintain her equilibrium in the world of her mercurial father. She attended a rigorous boarding school and then St Andrews University. After graduating with a degree in English and Philosophy, she spent time fundraising and during this time she worked with the Very Rev. Lord MacLeod of Fuinary – another outsize Scot who, like John Reith, 'loved a crisis'.

After marrying and bringing up her four children, she worked for the National Trust for Scotland and then launched the Insite Consultancy. Throughout her life, Marista has always been, like her father, a scribbler – on trains, aeroplanes or wherever she happens to be. With great insight and perspective and an absorbing style, she is now responding to a question that she has heard many, many times: 'What was it like growing up with Reith'? What, indeed?"