Antonella, Marchioness of Lothian proved a columnist well read by a pervious generation of Scots for her provocative and well-informed views.

In an era before the term "Women's Lib" was invented, Lady Lothian devoted her weekly piece to championing rights of the poor, the uninformed, the lesser educated and, above all, women. She didn't seek to trade the place of men against women: she simply saw it as right and proper that women should arrange their own places in the world.

To this end, in 1955 she founded the annual Women of the Year luncheons, choosing the Savoy in London for the international cachet the place provided. To the venue came a stream of women outstanding in every field - the wartime agent Odettes Hallowes GC, (nee Churchill), Margaret Thatcher, Diana Princess of Wales, Shirley Conran and Kate Adie.

She ignored protocols in gaining her guests, clambering over red tape during the Cold War and in the face of unpopularity over the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to bring Valentina Tereshkova, Russian cosmonaut and first women in space, to London.

Outgoing and vivacious, Lady Lothian - always known as Tony - formed a friendship with Mrs Tereshkova, the upshot of which many years later was a gift to the principal gallery in Yaroslav, central Russia, the cosmonaut's home city, of a portrait in oils of Lothian and Tereshkova entitled The Thinkers: Conversations with a Cosmonaut, the painter being Marie-Clare Kerr (Lady Ralph Kerr), her daughter-in-law. In 1993 Tony followed this with a biography of Tereshkova, Valentina, First Woman In Space: conversations with a Lothian.

Author, writer and broadcaster, Lady Lothian wrote for the Scottish Daily Express from 1960 in the years when the paper fought to be the greatest daily organ in Scotland, her tenure ending only with the temporary demise of the paper in 1974.

A Christian, in 1974 she founded Valiant For Truth, an annual award given to a truthful candidate in the media.

In 2002, she was made a Dame of the Papal Order of St Gregory for her work in interfaith understanding.

Antonella Newland, only child of Major-General Sir Foster Newland and his Italian wife Donna Salazar, worked as a nursing auxiliary during the Second World War, during which she met and married Peter Kerr, 12th Marquess of Lothian. She was 20 and he 21. Their six children include Michael (Earl of) Ancrum MP, former Shadow Foreign Secretary; Lady Cecil; and Lady Mary Kerr, folk-singer and international skier.

She spent her life caring for the underprivileged. Profits from the Women of the Year lunch went to the Greater London Fund for the Blind, she took a working role as vice-president of the Royal College of Nursing between 1960-1980, and was patron of the National Council of Women in the United Kingdom. She was appointed OBE in 1977 for her charity work.

Lord and Lady Lothian lived at Monteviot, their 18,000-acre estate near Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, until 1980. As a family project with son Michael, they then restored Ferniehurst Castle, a youth hostel in the 1960s and an ancient Lothian Z-plan sixteenth-century house whose twisting stairs are built right-handed, the opposite spiral to the usual, to accommodate the reputed left-handed "kerr-fistedness" of Kerr lairds.

Cancer hit Tony and Peter Lothian twice. In 1970 Lady Lothian lost an eye through cancer. She thereafter sported a black patch of unashamedly piratical appearance. In 2004, Peter Lothian died of the illness. She died in her 85th year, and is survived by her six children and many grandchildren.