Read The Times obituary and the news weblog: "A thousand feelings of rage".

Oriana Fallaci, the veteran Italian journalist best known for her startling interviews with some of the most famous politicians of the twentieth century, has died. She was 77.

Fallaci, who had been ill with cancer for several years, died at a private clinic in her home city of Florence overnight, said Paolo Klun, of the RCS publishing group, which published Fallaci’s work. She had returned to Florence in the last days of her life after living for decades in New York. In recent years, she had gained a second notoriety for her vitriolic writings on Islam.

Small, beautiful, and extraordinarily tough, Fallaci was an Italian resistance fighter who became a war correspondent in the 1950s and 1960s, covering the Vietnam War and conflicts in the Middle East and Latin America. She was shot three times and beaten by Mexican police covering student riots in 1968.

But it was her one-on-one interviews with politicians, generals and religious leaders, conducted, as she said "with a thousand feelings of rage" that were translated and published all over the world, often with extended transcripts showing the full extent of her blunt, acerbic inquiries.

Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian revolution who she compared to "‘Moses’ sculpted by Michelangelo", all met Fallaci, but perhaps none regretted the experience more than the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.

Mr Kissinger, who later called his interview with Fallaci "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press" responded to a bombardment of bald, unerring questions by admitting that the Vietnam war was "useless" and that he imagined himself as an American hero: "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse".

Despite ostensibly living a quiet life in Manhattan, in which she have occasional interviews to American magazines, Fallaci attracted enormous controversy and outrage in her last years after she rounded on Islam after the September 11 attacks.

The Rage and The Pride, written at high speed in the autumn of 2001, sold more than one million copies in Italy and led to accusations that Fallaci was intent on inciting hatred against Muslims. She wrote that Muslims "multiply like rats" and that "the children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day".

A subsequent work, The Strength of Reason, argued that Europe was too weak to withstand an Islamic invasion and that the Catholic Church was not providing an adequate response to the religion. Pope Benedict XVI, whose essay If Europe Hates Itself attracted Fallaci's attention, was criticised for meeting the writer last year.

Fallaci never married and leaves no children.

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