Fiona MacCarthy was a British biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th- and 20th-century art and design.
15 Facts About Fiona MacCarthy
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Fiona MacCarthy was born in Sutton, Surrey into an upper-class background, from which she spent much of her life escaping.
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Fiona MacCarthy's father, Gerald MacCarthy, was an officer in the Royal Artillery and was killed in action in North Africa during the Second World War in 1943.
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Fiona MacCarthy's grandmother, the Baroness de Belabre, was a daughter of Sir Robert McAlpine, 1st Baronet, who built and owned the Dorchester Hotel, and much of her childhood was spent in the hotel.
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In 1958, after a spell in Paris, she was a debutante being presented to the Queen at Queen Charlotte's Ball in the final year of the 200-year-old ritual, an experience MacCarthy recounted in her memoir, Last Curtsey: the End of the Debutantes.
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Fiona MacCarthy was one of only four of that year's debutantes to go on to university, in her case studying for a degree in English literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
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Fiona MacCarthy joined The Guardian in 1963 initially as an assistant to the women's editor Mary Stott.
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Fiona MacCarthy was then appointed the newspaper's design correspondent, working as a features writer and columnist, sometimes using a pseudonymous byline to avoid two articles appearing in the same issue.
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Fiona MacCarthy left The Guardian in 1969, briefly becoming women's editor of the London Evening Standard, before settling in Sheffield.
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Fiona MacCarthy was known for her arts essays and reviews, which appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books.
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Fiona MacCarthy was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art.
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Fiona MacCarthy was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature in the 2009 Birthday Honours.
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Fiona MacCarthy was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University and was awarded the Bicentenary Medal of the Royal Society of Arts.
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Fiona MacCarthy's biography William Morris: A Life for our Time was winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers' Guild Non-fiction Award.
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Fiona MacCarthy first met him when she went to interview him for The Guardian in 1964.