Kirsty Milne

Kirsty Mairi Milne (25 January 1964 – 9 July 2013) was a British journalist and academic.

Early life and career Kirsty Milne was born in Isleworth, Middlesex (now West London), to Alasdair Milne and his wife Sheila Graucob; the couple already had two sons, one of whom is Seumas Milne. The family moved to Lennoxtown, near Glasgow, in 1968 when her father became the controller of BBC Scotland, but returned to London when he was promoted in 1973 to become the BBC's Director of Programmes, Television. Milne was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class degree.

After a period as a trainee with the BBC, and continued on the staff of the New Statesman (for a time, the New Statesman and Society) after the two magazines merged. Remaining at the NS for about ten years, she eventually became the magazine's associate editor. During this period, she also freelanced for The Times and The Sunday Telegraph.

After 1999 Milne had developed a strong affection for Scotland during the five years of her childhood spent there, and the establishment of the Scottish Parliament following the 1997 devolution referendum gave her an opportunity to return in 1999. She was briefly on the staff of the Sunday Herald in Glasgow, before joining The Scotsman in Edinburgh. an appointment which she took up in 2004. At around the same time, she was a Fellow at Harvard's Centre for European Studies. Her research was drawn upon for Manufacturing Dissent, a pamphlet published by Demos in 2005.

She gained an MA in intellectual and cultural history, having been supervised at Queen Mary, University of London. A return to her Magdalen College, Oxford, followed in 2006 for her English DPhil on the change in the concept of Vanity Fair between John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Thackeray's novel of 1847. She received her doctorate in 2009. She was awarded a Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford during the 2009–10 academic year,

Milne died of lung cancer, although she had never smoked. Her father died earlier in 2013.