'She was a newspaper's dream.' Remembering Rachel Cooke

The Observer journalist, who died last week, was the heart and soul of the paper for 25 years. Here, Tim Adams reflects on her extraordinary legacy. Overleaf, friends and admirers pay their personal tributes, and we reprint a selection of her writing

- Tim Adams

Over recent months, during Rachel Cooke's absence, our ideas meetings at The Observer have been punctuated by a repeated refrain: “Rachel would have been so great at that.”; “That would have been a perfect Rachel Cooke piece.”; “When Rachel is back, she'll have so much fun interviewing him/ her/going there/investigating that...”

The truth is, that refrain applied equally to just about any idea you could come up with. Because Rachel could not only do everything as a journalist - fearless and funny commentary, ego-piercing interviews, campaigning social reporting, erudite and blistering book reviews, taste-making food writing, courageous foreign reportage - she could invariably do it all better, and quicker, than anybody else.

In the past few weeks, as grim updates on the last stages of Rachel’s brutal, summer-long cancer ordeal have arrived from her beloved husband, the writer Anthony Quinn, I've been in the habit of dipping into her back catalogue, partly to marvel again at the sheer range of her curiosity, partly to remind myself exactly what we have been missing.

You can take any month in the past quarter-century of The Observer and find more than a dozen memorable pieces with her byline. These, for example, are all from a short year ago, November 2024: a withering evisceration of Nadine Dorries’s memoirs; an affectionate account of refusing to be intimidated by John Prescott; a moving interview with the crossbench peer Lola Young about her childhood in care; a behind-the-scenes look at 30 years of Matthew Bourne's