The chain-smoking, dissident American writer and film critic Nora Sayre, who died on August 8th aged 68, was a brilliant member of that transatlantic band of radical sisters, including Jessica Mitford, Mary McCarthy and Martha Gellhorn, who seemed to have been born with an in-built lie detector.
She was also a fixture on the London literary scene in the 1950s and 60s. Although, "like a lot of my generation, I grew up with no politics at all", she was, at heart, a caustic and defiant critic of the spectacle known as McCarthyism. Shrewdly, she saw that America's anti-communist fervour of the post-war years preceded, and continued, long after Senator Joseph McCarthy's tumble from grace in 1955-'57.
Her aptly titled book, Running Time: Films Of The Cold War (1982), examining the effect of the cold war on Hollywood film-making, is essential reading for students, not only of the 1950s blacklist period but also of contemporary film. As she analysed it, the roots of today's schlock lie deep in Hollywood's political history of betraying its best.
Nonconformity came naturally to her. Born in Hamilton, Bermuda, she was the only daughter of Gertrude Lynahan, a New York World reporter with a history of suicidal breakdown, and Joel Sayre, a staff writer on the New Yorker magazine, who scripted Hollywood movies like Annie Oakley, Gunga Din and Fourteen Hours, and moved effortlessly in elite bohemia. The critic Edmund Wilson was a family friend, as were Graham Greene and Dorothy Parker. The Sayres saw many of their Hollywood friends destroyed by McCarthyism. "That was the background I grew up against, and I guess I just wanted to understand that era and identify the various forms that fear took in those days," she wrote.
Cultural panic - and what it did to people and their work - was later to become her special domain in many essays, articles and three memoirs, Sixties Going On Seventies (1973), Previous Convictions: A Journey Through The 1950s (1995) and On the Wing: A Young American Abroad (2001).
In 1950, she left the private Putney School in Vermont, and later graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in Boston. In 1955, she took her conventional year abroad in England, where she was an instant social hit. She hung out with a cosy cast of cosmopolites, including Arthur Koestler, his lover, writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, critic Cyril Connolly, the novelist Henry Green and Charlie and Oona Chaplin.
After a brief marriage, from 1957 to 1961, to the Cambridge economist and writer Robert Neild, she returned to the US, where she was the New Statesman's New York correspondent from 1965 to 1970. From 1973 to 1975, she was a film critic for the New York Times. But she hit her stride as a freelance political and cultural critic for such publications as, what she called the "good", Esquire, the Progressive and the Nation.
Reviewing Previous Convictions, David Caute, a historian of anti-communism, described Nora Sayre as an essayist whose light touch masked the formidable weight of her judgments, and whose "natural province is not so much history as people's consciousness. That is, what people were really feeling in the maelstrom of mid-century political change".
Even into middle age, Nora Sayre's writing continued to carry the elegant freshness of a young Radcliffe girl on the loose among heavier-handed grown-ups. Her last piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times in July.
Nora Clemens Sayre: born 1932; died, August 2001