Fiona MacCarthy

Fiona MacCarthy, OBE (born 23 January 1940) is a British biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th and 20th century art and design.

Fiona MacCarthy was born into an upper-class background, from which she spent much of her life escaping. Her father, an army officer, was killed in the Second World War when she was a child of three. She was brought up in London. Her grandmother, the Baroness de Belabre, was a daughter of Sir Robert McAlpine who built and owned the Dorchester Hotel and much of her childhood was spent in the hotel. The concrete construction of the Dorchester was said to make it bomb-proof and her family to refuge there during The Blitz.

She was educated at Wycombe Abbey School. In 1958, she was a debutante (presented to the Queen), the final year of this 200-year-old ritual, an experience she recounts in her 2007 memoir, Last Curtsey: the End of the Debutantes. She 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.

She began her career on The Guardian in the 1960s as a features writer and columnist before becoming a biographer and critic. She came to wider attention as a biographer with a once controversial study of the Roman Catholic craftsman and sculptor Eric Gill first published in 1989. MacCarthy is known for her arts essays and reviews, appearing regularly in The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. She has contributed to TV and radio arts programmes.

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