The journalist Charlotte Raven, who has died aged 55, was often the tallest person in a room, and, with the most angular of bob hairstyles, she ensured that she was always noticed. She held everyone’s attention effortlessly with sharp opinions, literary allusions and good old-fashioned salacious gossip.
In 2021, after starting experimental treatment for Huntington’s disease (HD), the illness that led to her death, she wrote a memoir, Patient 1, in collaboration with her younger brother, Daniel, in which she looked back on a career marked by controversies. She said: “Being paid to be horrible about people caused a lot of collateral damage to my relationships.” She was referring to the period in her 20s when she blazed away at the small but influential magazine the Modern Review, and later as a columnist for the Guardian.
