The outstanding characteristic of the journalist, writer, and lecturer Melanie McFadyean, who has died of cancer aged 72, was fearlessness. To this was added a wild sense of humour, a generosity of spirit and, most of all perhaps, an empathy with the dispossessed. She was a campaigner with an eye only for the subject, and never for her byline. It was this that made her effective in the world.
She wrote of her mother, Marion Guttman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, in Five Houses, an effortlessly elegant 2006 essay in Granta magazine. Marion, she said, “lost her identity, her nationality, and a large fortune. In her the shock has engendered pragmatism rather than nostalgia”.
