SUBJECTIVITY and passion are characteristics not always conducive to successful journalism. But Oriana Fallaci made them her watchwords and combined them with a brutal honesty. It was as much her fiery and unforgiving personality that made her Italy’s best-known and most controversial exponent of her trade as her record of revealing interviews with the likes of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Henry Kissinger.

It was her abundant rage and pride that in the last years of her life brought her both her widest readership and led to her being charged by an Italian court last year with the crime of denigrating Islam.

Fallaci’s sense of mission sprang from a childhood spent under Mussolini, and specifically in German-occupied Florence, where her father was one of the leaders of the Resistance. Thereafter she became preoccupied with power, its abuse and those who wielded it. She saw herself principally as a representative of the voiceless and repressed — especially women — and used her interviews fearlessly, even recklessly, to challenge those in authority.

Her articles did not read as dialogues, much less as a coolly objective profile of her subject, but as abrasive statements of her position on matters such as the Cold War or Islam’s teaching on women. This peculiarly Italian directness — what her race sees as an avoidance of the Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy of false politeness — she once justified thus: “I am the judge. I’m the one who decides. Listen, if I was a painter and I was doing your portrait, have I or haven’t I the right to paint you as I want?”

This stand inevitably led her many critics to criticise her as an egomaniac, but despite her reputation she consistently succeeded in catching her interviewees off-guard. Thus when in his pomp, Kissinger admitted to her that he pictured himself as a lone cowboy waiting for the caravan to catch up with him, a remark which undermined his standing; he later reflected that it was the most disastrous admission he had ever made to the press. In 1972 similarly incautious comments about Indira Ghandi by Pakistan’s leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, jeopardised a projected peace treaty between the countries. For his part, meanwhile, Khomeini admired Fallaci’s cheek when she wore make-up to their interview and vented her spleen about the indignities of the chador.

Though her temperament was of the Left, the keystone of it was the value she placed on personal freedom, a trait which led her into an almost unquestioning admiration of the United States. Latterly, she had made her home in Manhattan, and it was the events of September 11, 2001, that triggered the last and most contentious phase of her career, as a polemicist.

Two weeks after the attacks she wrote for an Italian newspaper a hostile critique of Islam — specifically, of the demands of Muslims to follow their cultural practices in the predominantly Christian West. The highly positive reception with which this met in her home country, one of the most homogenous and least multi-cultural in Europe, prompted her to expand it to book length, as La rabbia e l’orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride, 2002). It sold more than a million copies in Italy and several hundred thousand elsewhere in Europe.

Since its literary merits were slim, reading, as it did, as part memoir, part intemperate call-to-arms, its arguments rarely coherent, its success must be attributed to its having caught the mood of the times. Ironically, though one of Fallaci’s concerns was that what she saw as the servility of Europeans in the face of Islam’s imperial ambitions was caused by their having forgotten the lessons of the Second World War, the cheap potency of The Rage and the Pride recalls above all the rabble-rousing of the Fascist leaders.

As the War on Terror progressed, Fallaci followed it with several other publications of the same kind, notably La forza della ragione (The Force of Reason, 2005). Amid a round of attacks on her in the press by moderates and extremists alike, Fallaci was charged by the Italian authorities with vilifying a religion recognised by the State. She had hoped to live to testify at her trial, but the case never came to court. For some years she had been suffering from cancer and her condition worsened. A few days ago she returned to her home town, and she died in a Florence clinic.

Oriana Fallaci, the eldest of three sisters, was born in Florence in 1929. Her father was a cabinet-maker who early became active in the anti-Fascist movement, while her paternal uncle was a noted journalist.

Among her early memories was seeing Hitler when he visited Florence in 1938. In 1943, she and her family took refuge in a church when the Germans began blowing up the Arno bridges. Seeing her crying in terror, her father slapped her and told her that she must never show her tears again, an admonition she took to heart. After leaving the Liceo Galileo at 16, she enrolled briefly in the medical school at Florence University, but having decided that she wanted to write she then took a job with a local newspaper, working first on the crime beat.

By the mid-1950s, she was a correspondent for Italian magazines such as Epoca and L’Europeo, soon coming to specialise in wars. “What really pushes me is my obsession with death,” she said. She reported from Vietnam, where she irritated many liberals by criticising what she saw as the North’s Stalinist regime. Many years later she covered the Iraqi defeat in Kuwait.

She published her first book, an examination of Hollywood’s ills, in 1958. But for much of her career the books on which her literary reputation depended were the novels Lettera a un bambino mai nato (Letter to a Child Never Born, 1975) and Un uomo (A Man, 1979). Both stemmed from the most important romantic relationship of her life, that with the Greek political activist Alekos Panagoulis, whose lover she became two days after interviewing him. Panagoulis had been imprisoned and tortured in the late 1960s for planning to assassinate members of Greece’s military regime, and in 1976 he died in a car accident that many assumed to be murder.

He and Fallaci had been together for a stormy three years, and the two novels celebrate both the child of his that she was carrying but lost, and his political struggle. Like her other most notable work, Insciallah (1992), a fictional account of the Italian involvement in Beirut during the civil war, the books are uneven mixtures of headlong prose, unprocessed emotion, shrewd insight and bathos, dominated by an inescapable authorial voice.

Oriana Fallaci was short of stature and always elegantly, even severely dressed. She lived in spartan fashion, working slowly and obsessively, her only vice being cigarettes. Though an atheist, she was an admirer of the present Pope, who she liked to think shared her concerns about Islam.

Oriana Fallaci, journalist and author, was born on July 29, 1929. She died of cancer on September 15, 2006, aged 77.