Rachel Cooke he’s dead. A well-known versatile journalist, with an interest in culinary topics, from Observerhe just has 56 years old. He had cancer, which was not diagnosed until early 2025. The world of British journalism is in mourning and heartfelt tributes in recent hours have also been abundant on social media. “Whatever topic he takes, from the lightest to the most challenging, Rachel he treated him with great strictness and boundless curiosity. Did I ask for something trivial – I once sent him to try it botox – whether he should interview a very powerful figure, he always finds the story”, recalls for example the former director TimeNicola Jealous. Cooke fell in love with journalism as a child. Her source of inspiration is Katharine Whitehorn, brilliant and impudent pioneer of feminism, so much so that in 2013 her first book dedicated to the world of women was published: “His brilliant career” with the subtitle “Ten extraordinary women of the fifties”.
Among them, Cooke has told the stories of director Muriel Box, plant expert Margery Fish, food writer Patience Gray and rally driver Sheila van Damm. The daughter of a biologist, she spent her childhood in Israel, where she attended the Church of Scotland school in Jaffa, where Arabs and Jews studied together. One of his famous amarcord reports where he describes the moments in it as a child he traded KitKats for warm za’atar bread from local classmates. “Food as a bridge between people, as a form of community: an idea that never left him,” his colleagues recalled. “He had culture, authority, bite, humor, and an inexhaustible energy of ideas. Even though he wrote more than a hundred thousand words a year, he still found time to read and see it all.. He is a champion”, recalls Jane Ferguson, his colleague at New Review. Rachel he can’t just do everything as a journalist (among the latter parts were those at Charles’s coronation), but he did it better and faster than anyone else”.
