Ian Bell obituary

Award-winning political columnist admired as much for his integrity as for his fluent, stylish writing

One of the last pieces written by Ian Bell, who has died aged 59 of unknown causes, was a tribute to his fellow wordsmith William McIlvanney. It was Bell at his best: packed with personal insight, stylish and emotional. “You can lose lifetimes in handfuls of words. He was a friend of mine: six words,” he wrote. Three days after it was published in the Herald newspaper, Bell, journalist, writer and poet, was dead too. Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, summed up the widespread feeling in a tweet: “We have lost William McIlvanney and Ian Bell in just one week. Too much.”

Bell was an award-winning political columnist, whose career spanned a host of publications that included the Scotsman, Herald, Sunday Herald, Daily Record, Punch and the Times Literary Supplement. At the Observer, he was editor of a separate Scotland supplement. He wrote as fluently about the arts as he did politics and was author of biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson and Bob Dylan.