No one meeting the political columnist Kirsty Milne ("It's pronounced Keersty") for the first time, as I did on joining the New Statesman in 1994, could fail to come away less than deeply impressed, if perhaps slightly frightened. Super-clever, spiky and fast-talking, Kirsty, who has died of cancer aged 49, could run intellectual circles around most people. But she was also incredibly kind, her abundant warmth at odds with her Scottish intellectual seriousness.
The youngest member of a media dynasty – her father was the BBC director general Alasdair Milne, her brother is the Guardian journalist Seumas Milne – Kirsty was intensely precocious as a child, socially and intellectually.
Dandled on the knees of Davids Frost and Attenborough, she was accustomed to adult company of the kind that didn't patronise or scoff. Later, she became such an adult herself – her renown in our household resting on her methodical execution of bunny hops. Kirsty was always fascinated by children, who struck her as less predictable than adults and, often, as having more interesting things to say: raw, formative creatures, children – like some promising narrative lead – might be shaped into story.
Kirsty was born in Isleworth, west London. Then, in 1968, the family moved to a rural spot on the edge of Lennoxtown, near Glasgow. For the next five years, Kirsty's childhood was an idyll. She loved telling stories about herself as she went about her day, singing along to the Beatles, and listening rapt as her mother, Sheila, read her The Pilgrim's Progress in the bath. Scotland became a place forever tinctured with romance. (Later, in 2001, she would marry the Scottish-born architect Hugh Shaw Stewart.) Before the Milnes drove south for good, Kirsty kept asking that the car be stopped so she could roll in the heather one last time.
After 10 years at the New Statesman and New Society, Kirsty returned in 1999 to a Scotland in the grip of devolution, producing some of her keenest political writing for the Herald and the Scotsman. But then, in her mid-40s, Kirsty decided to become a student again.
Education had been a path paved with scholarships (at St Paul's girls' school, London, and Magdalen College, Oxford) and awards (a Nieman fellowship at Harvard), but second time round at Magdalen proved more challenging. Her DPhil supervisors were the same age as her, and her journalistic training as much a hindrance as a boon. But she jumped in, exploring how "vanity fair" – corrupt and disdained in Bunyan – became, by Thackeray's time, this fast, attractive world where one got ahead. That our own world bore Thackeray's imprint, not Bunyan's, was not lost on her.
Recalling Kirsty's extraordinary drive to complete her doctorate after she was diagnosed with cancer, her Magdalen supervisor, Professor Sharon Achinstein, says that "she hungered for the contemplative aspects of scholarship".
Kirsty was not a religious person; for her, spirit resided in the life of the mind. In that sense, her research and unfolding academic career really was her calling. Yet it was also her roundabout route back to the brilliant inner child that those who knew her best loved most.
Kirsty is survived by Hugh, and by her brothers Ruairidh and Seumas.
