Susan Sontag dies at 71

Sontag was among the first to raise a dissenting voice after September 11, 2001, in a controversial New Yorker magazine essay arguing that talk of an "attack on civilization" was "drivel."

A tall and imposing figure with white-streaked, long black hair and a severe demeanour, Sontag was a fixture on the New York intellectual scene. She played herself in Woody Allen's 1983 comedy "Zelig", and directed four films of her own.

She ignited a firestorm of criticism when she declared that the September 11 attacks were not a "cowardly attack" on civilization but "an act undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions".

With much of America still too shocked to consider such views, she was vilified in some quarters. An op-ed piece in the Boston Globe contended the comments confirmed what many already thought about her: "high IQ, but a few quarts low on compassion and common sense."

Sontag has since been an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush over his response to the September 11 attacks and particularly the U.S. war in Iraq.

In May this year she wrote an essay in the New York Times about the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad, arguing that the shocking photographs of the abuse would likely becoming the defining images of the war.

The piece prompted an editorial writer at the Financial Times to describe her as "the liberal lioness ... the pride of hand-wringing elitist liberalism".

Novelist E.L. Doctorow described her as "quite fearless".