Catherine Haste, Baroness Bragg (6 August 1945 – 29 April 2021)[1] was an English author, biographer, historian and documentary film director, who worked freelance for major television networks in the UK and US over a period of 40 years.
Early life
Haste was born in Leeds, one of three surviving daughters of Margaret (née Hodge) and Eric Haste. She spent part of her childhood in Australia from age four before returning to England seven years later. Haste attended Thornbury Grammar School in Bristol before going on to study English at the University of Sussex, graduating in 1966. She then pursued a Postgraduate Diploma in Adult Education at the University of Manchester.[2]
Television documentaries
Haste directed political and historical documentaries and series, including Munich: The Peace of Paper.[3] For Cold War, Jeremy Isaacs' 24-part series,[4] Haste directed five films. She directed Flashback TV's Hitler's Brides[5] about women in Nazi Germany; produced Death of a Democrat in Secret History, the series broadcast by Channel 4;[6] and Married to the Prime Minister,[7] presented by Cherie Blair, the wife of the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
Books
Haste's first book, Keep the Home Fires Burning (1977), was described by journalist Phillip Knightley as: "One can only hope that this important book will make it more difficult for any British government so deeply to deceive its people ever again."[8]Maureen Freely wrote that Rules of Desire (1997) was "as diverting and as suggestive as a very good novel.... temperate, balanced, subtle and humane".[9]The Daily Telegraph critic wrote that Nazi Women: Hitler's Seduction of a Nation (2001) "opens up the bizarre moral universe of the Third Reich ....at once comprehensible and compelling, and at times deeply moving. It is media history at its best."[10] The prize-winning Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (2010), a biography/monograph of the Cumbrian Expressionist landscape painter, signalled Haste's shift to biography and was, according to Andrew Lambirth, "a handsome, slim volume ....elegantly and deftly put together".[11]
She lived in Hampstead, north London, and like her former husband was a member of the Labour Party. She died from cancer in April 2021, aged 75.[2][12][13]
