Ann Barr, who has died aged 85, will be remembered for adding the word Sloane – to describe a fashionable upper-class young woman – to the English language. Ann was deputy editor of Harpers & Queen (now Harper’s Bazaar) when her first book, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, co-written with Peter York, was published in 1982. It described in colourful detail what her readers were like. It was mischievous, gossipy and funny, like Ann herself.

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The idea was to update Nancy Mitford’s essay on U and non-U in the style of the American Official Preppy Handbook, published in the US in 1980. Ann’s book began a few years earlier as an article in Harpers & Queen when she commissioned a piece on a tribe she had observed at close quarters. The name Sloane Ranger came out of a last-minute vote from the subeditors. Follow-up pieces were published and then came the book, a masterpiece of social observation that identified and exposed the codes, speech, manner and lifestyles of Rangerland’s Henrys and Carolines.

The book sold more than a million copies, was reprinted several times, dominated the Publishers Weekly charts for the next two years, and recently featured 87th in the Sunday Times’s bestselling books since the list began 40 years ago. It also fulfilled a long-held ambition for Ann: at the age of 10 she had ended a letter to her father: “PS. I want to write a book.” She went on to write, again with York, The Official Sloane Ranger Diary (1983) and The Official Sloane Ranger Directory (1984).

Ann was born in London, the second of four children of a Canadian mother, Margaret Gordon, and a Scottish father, Andrew Greig Barr. Ann’s grandfather, also called Andrew Greig Barr, invented the soft drink Irn-Bru, which still has the Barr name on the logo. In 1939, at the start of the second world war, Margaret took her children to Montreal and put Ann into a private school called the Study, where Margaret had previously been head girl and had a house named after her.

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In 1945, the family sailed home on the Cunard liner Franconia and Ann went to St Margaret’s boarding school (now Moor Park) in Ludlow, Shropshire. Shortly afterwards Ann’s father, who had been a captain in the Royal Artillery, was sent to Germany with the Control Commission, a body set up to manage local authority affairs in the country after the war. Ann spent school holidays there in a whirl of gymkhanas and point-to-points, hunts, picnics, fishing trips, sailing, dinners, cocktail and yacht club parties, playing tennis, and skiing.

In 1950, the Barrs moved to Eaton Square, in Belgravia, London. Ann got a job as a secretary at the Times, and filled her diary with Ascot, Henley, Goodwood, the Derby, balls, parties, dances and shoots. She spent her evenings at the theatre, and at the Linguists’ Club studying German, or the Times’s swimming club and weekends in Oxford with her boyfriend, Neville Dent. Ann wrote to “Nevskins” daily, but never accepted his proposals of marriage.

After a series of jobs following her stint at the Times, Ann eventually moved to House & Garden magazine as a subeditor in 1962, then filled a similar post at the Weekend Telegraph magazine from 1967 until 1969, when she became features editor of Queen, which turned into Harpers & Queen the following year. As features and deputy editor from 1971 to 1985 – actually the most powerful position in the magazine – she raised the circulation from 40,000 to 100,000. Her forte was cutting observation, and the magazine became known for her “many hands” articles – those she put together by garnering views from her friends and contacts. “The magazine had too little money for big-name writers,” she said. “Luckily .. what the readers and staff had to say about any topic usually made a sharper, more amusing article than one author could produce by conventional means.”

Ann published groundbreaking journalism at Harpers & Queen, including Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman, which interpreted the Marquis de Sade’s heroines as feminists (that issue was banned in Scotland), some work by the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng and Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, published in full before a UK publisher was found. She also nurtured talent: Craig Brown, Nicholas Coleridge, Mary Ann Sieghart, Jon Savage, Stephen Bayley, Loyd Grossman, Fay Maschler, Hamish Bowles, Paul Levy, Victoria Mather and Oliver James were among those she presented with a platform.

Ann would flit around H&Q’s Soho office in her Thea Porter clothes and paste jewellery, gathering people’s thoughts, always with a ballpoint pen in her hand, or with the end in her mouth when she was deep in thought, drinking coffee by the gallon to keep herself going – she went out most nights after working late.

She was interested in everyone’s opinions, but kept her own to herself. She would emit high shrieks of laughter when she read or heard something funny, but had a slightly forbidding manner; you wouldn’t lightly interrupt her. A quiet, gentle, vulnerable, kind woman, she also had a darker side, and her anger would leap out unexpectedly. There was not much grey about her: you were either right or wrong.

After Harpers & Queen she became women’s editor of the Observer from 1985 to 1989, where she was more serious: she published one of the first articles on crack cocaine in a British newspaper, and pieces on women who love too much, Aids, domestic violence and child abuse. In 1984 she wrote The Official Foodie Handbook with Levy and, after five years at the Observer, she left to ghostwrite a memoir of the communist activist Elisabeth Furse called Dream Weaver (1993), her last major project before retirement.

Ann was not domesticated – she looked down on those who were – and her tiny top-floor flat in Notting Hill was chaotic, ruled by her parrot Turkey, who flew freely about, depositing mess, clawing her way through papers, gnawing at boxes and plastic, and sharing Ann’s food. She rarely entertained at home and kept people she wanted to impress away from there.

She was intensely loyal and generous, with many godchildren and friends, but it didn’t do to get on the wrong side of her: she turned against York in her later years, much to his dismay, as she felt he was getting the glory for her work on Sloane Rangers. He tried hard to stay friends, but Ann was unforgiving. Although she never married, perhaps her most important relationship was with the journalist and poet Alan Riddell, whom she met at the Telegraph. He died unexpectedly in 1977 at 50 of a brain haemorrhage.

Ann lived in Notting Hill for half a century (to her parents’ dismay – “Who’d live north of the park?”) and kept Alan’s belongings in her flat for years. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2009, she initially managed at home with a daily carer. In 2011 she moved with Turkey, her pet for more than 25 years, to a nursing home in Pimlico, where her brother Greig’s weekly delivery of fresh flowers always brought a smile to her face.

She is survived by Greig.

• Isabel Ann Barr, journalist, born 16 September 1929; died 4 May 2015

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Free Download Peter York Sloane Ranger Handbook Programs And Features Chart

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