Anne Pauline Clarke was born in Kirkby-in-Ashfield in Nottinghamshire in 1921 and now lives in Bottisham, Cambridgeshire. Happy 85th, Pauline Clarke! She attended schools in London and Colchester. Until 1943 she studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, then worked as a journalist and wrote for children's magazines. Between 1948 and 1972 she wrote books for children.

She wrote many types of children's book including fantasies, family comedies, historical novels and poetry. Her Five Dolls books were very popular, but she achieved her greatest success with The Twelve and the Genii, published in America as The Return of the Twelves, which received the Carnegie Medal, a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and the German Kinderbuchpreis. These books, like many of her others, were illustrated by Cecil Leslie.

In 1969 she married the historian Peter Hunter Blair. She edited his Anglo-Saxon Northumbria in 1984. In 1999 she published her first adult book, The Nelson Boy, a painstakingly-researched historical reconstruction of Horatio Nelson's childhood, which was followed by a sequel about his early voyages.

As Helen Clare

• Five Dolls in a House (1953)
• Five Dolls and the Monkey (1956)
• Five Dolls in the Snow (1957)
• Five Dolls and Their Friends (1959)
• Five Dolls and the Duke (1963)
• Merlin's Magic (1953)
• Bel the Giant and Other Stories, illustrated by Peggy Fortnum (1956) (republished as The Cat and the Fiddle and Other Stories, illustrated by Ida Pellei (1968)
• Seven White Pebbles, illustrated by Cynthia Abbott,(1960)

As Pauline Clarke

• The Pekinese Princess (1948)
• The Great Can (1952)
• The White Elephant (1952)
• Smith's Hoard (1955) also published as Hidden Gold (1957) and as The Golden Collar (1967)
• Sandy the Sailor (1956)
• The Boy with the Erpingham Hood (1956)
• James the Policeman (1957)
• James and the Robbers (1959)
• Torolv the Fatherless (1959)
• The Lord of the Castle (1960)
• The Robin Hooders (1960)
• Keep the Pot Boiling (1961)
• James and the Smugglers (1961)
• Silver Bells and Cockle Shells (1962)
• The Twelve and the Genii (1962) also published as The Return of the Twelves (1964)
• James and the Black Van (1963)
• Crowds of Creatures (1964)
• The Bonfire Party (1966)
• The Two Faces of Silenus (1972)

As Pauline Hunter Blair

• Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, Variorum by Peter Hunter Blair (editor, with Michael Lapidge) (1984)
• The Nelson Boy: An Imaginative Reconstruction of a Great Man's Childhood (1999)
• A Thorough Seaman: The Ships' Logs of Horatio Nelson's Early Voyages Imaginatively Explored (2000)
• Warscape (2002)
• Jacob's Ladder (2003)