IN A writing career of more than seventy years, the Hungarian writer and journalist Judith Listowel campaigned internationally against oppression in Eastern Europe and in Africa. She had the distinction of being blacklisted by both Nazi Germany and communist Hungary; and although she lived in England from the 1920s, she remained an ardent Hungarian patriot.

Judith Listowel was the daughter of Raoul de Marffy-Mantuano, a diplomat who was the first Hungarian to represent his country abroad. She was brought up at the Austro-Hungarian Embassy in Rome. After reading economics at Budapest University, she won a scholarship to read economic history at the London School of Economics. She wanted to become a political journalist in Hungary, but this was not considered acceptable for a woman at the time, so she settled in London and from 1929 until 1940 she was a foreign correspondent for two Hungarian daily papers.

In 1933 she married the 5th Earl of Listowel, a Labour politician who subsequently served in Attlee’s Cabinet. The marriage was not a success. Billy Listowel was a socialist and an atheist, and by temperament mild mannered. His wife was a conservative, a devout Catholic and apt to be combative. They broke up in the late 1930s and Lady Listowel remained single for the next 65 years, living off her earnings as a freelance journalist.

In 1932 she visited Berlin and interviewed the Nazi press chief Dr E. F. S. (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengl. The ineptness of his responses on Nazi economic policy caused an international uproar. Two years later she and her husband travelled to Germany on a futile mission to investigate concentration camps. They both subsequently appeared in Die Sonderfahndungsliste GB (“the Black Book”), a list of 2,820 British subjects to be arrested by the SS on the Nazi occupation of Britain.

In 1936 she began the first of a series of lecture tours in America. At the outbreak of war she trained as a nurse, and she later served on the lecture staff of the Ministry of Information in London and the Ministry of Defence.

Listowel was much distressed at the communist takeover of her native Hungary and its neighbouring countries. In October 1944 she started a weekly publication, East Europe, for the purpose of “providing the true facts about Soviet Russia’s dealings with her satellites”.

The journal, renamed East Europe and Soviet Russia in 1950 and Soviet Orbit in 1954, lasted for ten years and went to 41 countries. It was staunchly anti-Soviet and anti-communist, and Listowel was refused her visa to visit Hungary until 1964.

Meanwhile, her brother Tomi and his three children had become stuck in Hungary at the end of the war. Listowel worked tirelessly to secure their release and emigration to England, one by one. The last to remain was the youngest child, Peter.

Before the visit to England of Bulganin and Khrushchev in April 1956, Listowel mounted a press campaign to embarrass the Hungarian Government, and Peter’s story was front-page news. He eventually arrived in London in a blaze of publicity on the same day as Bulganin and Khrushchev.

In the postwar years Listowel wasmuch involved in the efforts of the United Nations’ Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to send supplies of food and clothing to the war-shattered Hungarian people.

During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 she hovered on the Austrian side of the Hungarian border. On November 4 she smuggled herself in, flagged down a car and demanded to be taken to Budapest. The driver refused, on the ground that she would be shot by the Russians, whereupon she smuggled herself back.

In 1961 Listowel was invited to Tanganyika and was asked to write a semi-official history of the country. The book, The Making of Tanganyika, came out in 1965 and projected an optimistic view of the future of the African colonies which had recently obtained independence. This precipitated a period of some 25 years during which Listowel spent several months a year shuttling between countries in Africa.

By the mid-1970s, though, she was disillusioned with the incompetence and corruption she had witnessed.

In 1973 the Irish University Press asked her to write a biography of General Idi Amin, the President of Uganda. In the book she described allegations made in 1965 in the Ugandan parliament about the then President, Milton Obote. He and some colleagues retaliated by suing Listowel for libel in London. Since she could not persuade people in Uganda to give evidence, for fear of reprisals, she was advised to admit liability, and damages of £70,000 were awarded against her. She appealed against the damages and eventually Obote and his colleagues settled out of court for a small fraction of the original sum.

In the 1980s Listowel’s interest in Africa waned and, excited by the new resistance to communism in Eastern Europe, she returned to her old haunts. Like most Hungarians she was strongly Polophile, and she visited Poland for a month each year.

Until her early nineties she entertained frequently and travelled regularly to the Hurlingham Club to swim and play bridge. She spent her last years at home, where she celebrated her 100th birthday with champagne and tokaji from her homeland.

Lady Listowel had one daughter, Lady Deirdre Curteis, who married the 7th Lord Grantley and, after his death, the author Ian Curteis.

Judith, Countess of Listowel, writer and journalist, was born on July 12, 1903. She died on July 15, 2003, aged 100.