Christina Gascoigne, who has died aged 87, was an Arabist, photographer and ceramicist whose teenage account of being caught up in the 1958 Lebanon crisis made gripping reading; she also accompanied her polymath husband Bamber Gascoigne, the University Challenge presenter, on countless adventures, contributing to his books and helping him to build an opera house in the grounds of a stately home he inherited from a great-aunt.
The couple once drove a Peugeot 404 through the Khyber Pass and on to India to research his book The Great Moghuls (1971), later a television documentary. The journey was not without incident: Christina rolled the car and they knocked someone down, though neither vehicle nor pedestrian suffered serious damage.
Christine and Bamber Gascoigne on their wedding day in 1965 - Clara Molden
Another adventure came in 2014 when he inherited West Horsley Place, a tumbledown Tudor mansion in Surrey, from Mary, ****** ss of Roxburghe. The couple sold the ****** ss's possessions, using the £8.8 million proceeds to restore the 50-room pile and build a 700-seat opera house that in 2017 became the home of Grange Park Opera.
"We both always had a 'let's go' attitude," she said. "And Bamber was very susceptible to enthusiasm. If I said, 'Oh, that sounds exciting,' he'd go and do it."

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