My aunt Angela Yaffey, who has died aged 92, was a lover of art, literature, the architecture of early mosques and monasteries, and tortoises, of which she kept many over the years.

She was born in Cambridge to Phyllis (nee Mudie Cooke), a classical archaeologist, and the literary critic EMW Tillyard. She wanted to become a painter like her aunt, the first world war artist Olive Mudie-Cooke, but was diverted from this path and instead, after being evacuated to Toronto for two years during the second world war and a stint in the Women’s Land Army, she studied Italian and Serbo-Croat at Cambridge University and then joined the Foreign Office.

Sent to Belgrade, she fell in love with the Balkans and the countries round the Black Sea, going back many times in subsequent years and writing an elegant short book, The Land and People of Yugoslavia, which was published in 1962.

Returning to the UK in the mid-1950s, Angela joined the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park outside Reading, monitoring Radio Moscow and All India Radio. Caversham’s eclectic mixture of linguists, exiles and refugees suited her well and she stayed for the rest of her working life. It was here that she met her first husband, Ted Ahlers, an exile from the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal.

Some years after Ted’s death she married Hymie Yaffey, a teacher who had been a pupil of her father’s at Cambridge. She continued to travel, not neglecting the Galapagos for their giant tortoises; and once, in Delhi, she met the broadcasters at All India Radio whose voices she had heard from afar for many years.

She shared her large overgrown garden outside Henley, Oxfordshire, with many tortoises, and was especially happy when tortoises in need of temporary shelter arrived, sent by customs officials who had confiscated them at Heathrow airport. In the winters they lay in stacked boxes in her small cottage. No central heating disturbed them; Angela travelled the world while they slept, and returned before they woke.

She lived on her own terms, pursuing the odd, the quirky and the out-of-the-way, fascinated by different worlds and determined to have an interested and fulfilled life. A strong believer in equality, she left her estate to benefit refugees, the homeless, the environment, art collections, and tortoises.

She is survived by her sister, Veronica, and five nephews and nieces.