There is a pink-walled pub across the road, an up-market hairdressers next door and various takeaway food shops dotted elsewhere along the narrow North Oxford street, which is festooned at present with festive bunting.

Felicity Bryan’s offices in North Parade Avenue are in a seemingly unlikely, unshowy location for a woman who in her highly specialised line of work is famous across the world.

Behind an unassuming front door, in a property steadily and tastefully extended over the years, is housed a thriving business with a mission to promote literature throughout the globe. The books that line the walls are all books that her literary agency has helped bring into being since its establishment in 1988.

Talking about her life and work in the elegant conservatory meeting room recently added to the building, she pulls volumes from the shelves to illustrate the points she is making.

Their authors, in many cases, are household names: people like Rosamunde Pilcher, Edmund de Waal, Mary Berry, Roy Strong, John Julius Norwich and Karen Armstrong (“I sold her A History of God in 32 languages.”).

Some she has persuaded to write books for the first time; with others she has pointed their career in a new direction and been delighted to see how well this has worked. Not just clients, they are also friends. After this interview, she was heading to London for tea with Miriam Stoppard. Has she got a new book? “Miriam always has a new book.”

To start at the beginning, Felicity was born in 1945, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, the middle one of three sisters. Their father, Paul Bryan, had been a distinguished soldier who “started in the ranks and ended up as the youngest colonel in the British army”. He was awarded the DSO for ‘outstanding’ leadership during the Sicilian campaign.

He later served as a MP for an East Riding Constituency for 30 years (Conservative — “Round there you can only be Tory”). Wikipedia records his remarkable feat as a golfer of scoring two holes in one in one round. He died in 2004 aged 91, Felicity’s mother Betty having predeceased him many years earlier.

Felicity’s schooling was at Benenden, in Kent, where her younger sister was a contemporary of the Princess Royal.

Clearly academically precocious, she was one of a small group who took A-levels early, gaining hers (history, English and art) at 16. While studying in Paris, she decided on a university career back in England. She managed to win a place studying the history of art at London’s Courtauld Institute, then based at Home House in Portman Square.

“Anthony Blunt was my tutor. I liked him.”

In 1966, she was among a team of Courtauld students who volunteered to use their growing expertise helping in the clear-up following the disastrous Venice floods. This supplied her with an entrée into the world of journalism when she wrote about their activities for the Daily Telegraph.

Her three-year course over, she found a job on The Burlington Magazine, an art connoisseurs’ journal edited by Benedict Nicolson.

After a visit to America (“I took a Greyhound bus to California — I just loved it.”), she came back to England and began plotting her return to the country full-time.

This was achieved with a job working for the Washington bureau of the Financial Times under its American correspondent Joe Rogaly.

Memorable events during her two years there included Richard Nixon’s defeat of Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election of 1969 and the assassination six months earlier of Robert Kennedy.

“I was preparing a lifestyle feature on the gun laws and had to stay up all night finishing it, because it was suddenly so appropriate.”

Felicity was working back in Britain for the Economist when, known for her interest in books and authors, she was headhunted by the leading literary agents Curtis Brown, then based in Covent Garden.

“I started to look for authors to represent, and quite a lot of people were people I knew through journalism.”

One of her early authors was Rosamunde Pilcher, whom she encouraged away from writing short stories and romance into the longer fiction like The Shell Seekers that was to make her professional name and fortune. “She was my professional fairy godmother,” says Felicity.

Other author ‘finds’ were in history, including Lord Norwich, and science, including Francis Crick and Matt Ridley.

There was also cookery (Mary Berry, then not a TV star) and gardening was a strong suit, too, with authors such as Rosemary Verey, Penelope Hobhouse and Roy Strong.

This was a subject on which Felicity was to write two of her three books. The other was Nursery Style with the Oxford designer Annie Sloan.

Following her marriage in 1981 to the Oxford-based economist Alex Duncan she initially resisted moving here until having children (there were eventually three) changed her mind.

“It is a rather good place to bring up children.”

From Summertown they moved to a large house in Kidlington, with Felicity commuting for five years to Curtis Brown.

In 1988, she set up her own agency in a then tiny North Parade flat, bringing with her, after carefully negotiating a deal, many of ‘her’ clients.

Her aim from the outset was to create the international company that exists stronger than ever today.

In 2001, Catherine Clarke joined the firm and the following year came the recruitment of Sally Holloway as an associate agent, specialising in non-fiction.

In 2006, former film producer Caroline Wood came to the company as an agent (and brought best-selling Sadie Jones as her first author).

With a restructuring two years ago, Catherine became managing director, Caroline became a director and Felicity the chair of the newly-formed Felicity Bryan Associates.

It is entirely accidental, says Felicity, that the company’s key figures are all women.

Having ideas for authors is an important part of the agent’s role, in Felicity’s case at any rate.

She illustrates this with a story about her client Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, Oxford University’s Professor of the History of the Church and one of many Oxford academics to use her services.

As she tells it, she plucks copies of the books it concerns from the shelves behind her. The tale illustrates, too, that it can be useful to be based in Oxford with its connections to a wider world.

“He had written Thomas Cranmer: A Life and had won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He hadn’t got an agent and was put on to me. I said: ‘You must write the history of the European Reformation. That’s the gap. There hadn’t been a one-volume book on the subject for 50 years.’.

“I got it commissioned by Penguin. It came out and won every prize, including a top one in America. Then he wanted to write a life of Thomas Cromwell. I was cautious because prospective American readers wouldn’t know who he was, or think he was the other Cromwell.

“Then his Penguin editor suggested he write a history of Christianity and he did that. I put a proposal through Mark Thompson’s door [the then director general of the BBC, living in nearby St Margaret’s Road] saying that the BBC had never done a history of Christianity, and so it should.

“The result was a commission for six hours of television from him on the subject.

“And then Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall came out, so that everyone got to know who Thomas Cromwell was, even in America. “Now Diarmaid is writing his book about him.”