Obituaries

Professor John Richmond: Physician and spleen specialist

John Richmond was an expert on the spleen and one of few professors of medicine to be an all-round general physician.

Inside Obituaries

Sir Derek Higgs: Banker and chairman of Alliance & Leicester who brought sweeping reforms to Britain's boardrooms

Wednesday, 30 April 2008

Derek Higgs enjoyed a glittering business career, first in investment banking and latterly as a company director of blue-chip businesses such as Prudential and Alliance & Leicester. However, it is for his work as a regulator and City reformer that he will be best remembered; his sweeping reforms to the way British companies are governed were hugely controversial when he drew them up in 2003, but are now widely accepted.

Joy Page: Actress in 'Casablanca'

Wednesday, 30 April 2008

Joy Page was one of the last two surviving members of the cast of what is arguably the most beloved of Hollywood movies, Casablanca. Her role, as a young Bulgarian bride hoping to flee to America with her husband if they can procure the necessary exit visas, was a small one, but a strand which revealed telling traits in the attitudes and relationship of café-owner Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Prefect of Police, Captain Renault (Claude Rains).

Professor Brian Cox: English scholar, poet and editor of 'Critical Quarterly' whose Black Papers sparked debate on education

Tuesday, 29 April 2008

Brian Cox was a gifted teacher, a superb editor, a skilled administrator and a considerable poet. In another life he might have been a vice-chancellor or perhaps a junior minister for education. However his commitment to the teaching of English, both reading and writing, meant that much of his working life was devoted to raising the standard of debate about education in general and the teaching of English in particular.

Jimmy Giuffre: Jazz clarinettist and composer

Tuesday, 29 April 2008

The casual listener would perhaps enjoy Jimmy Giuffre's folksy, bluesy clarinet playing, but to jazz historians he was perhaps more potent as a writer and arranger. His "Four Brothers", written for the saxophone players in Woody Herman's 1947 Second Herd, including Stan Getz and Zoot Sims, became one of the everlasting jazz classics. He was perhaps best known for the trio he led on clarinet that played attractive and basic jazz like his famed "The Train and the River", which, in one of the best bits of jazz cinema ever, opened the film Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960), a documentary record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.

Tristram Cary: Pioneer of electronic music

Tuesday, 29 April 2008

Tristram Cary was a pioneer of tape and electronic music but was equally at home with more conventional forces. As well as writing for the concert hall, he scored the film The Ladykillers and episodes of Doctor Who. He co-designed, with Peter Cockerell and David Zinovieff, the VCS3 synthesizer, making the new technology widely available; the synthesizer featured on Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon among many other albums.

Gustaw Holoubek: Leading actor in Polish theatre

Monday, 28 April 2008

His roles were epoch-making. Yet, whether he played Napoleon or Hamlet, Alceste in Molière's Misanthrope, or Woland in the television adaptation of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Gustaw Holoubek invariably remained himself.

Professor Edward Lorenz: Meteorologist whose work on weather prediction led to the discovery of chaos and the 'butterfly effect'

Saturday, 26 April 2008

Edward Lorenz was a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) whose investigations into predictability of the atmosphere led to the discovery of chaos and "strange attractors", while also changing the way operational forecasts are made. Known for his passion for science, his kindness, and his gift for writing, Lorenz produced papers of clarity and beauty, illustrated with understanding and gentle humour.

Joseph Solman: Artist friend of Rothko and Pollock

Saturday, 26 April 2008

It is apt that Joseph Solman should have died in his sleep, in his 100th year, in the Manhattan apartment where he spent half his life. In a career that spanned nearly eight decades, Solman had lived through social realism, Cubism, expressionism and the Neo-Ashcan School, had championed and then rejected abstraction. In the course of all this, he made friends with artists far more extreme than himself, and whose names are much better known: among them Jackson Pollock and Marcus Rothkowitz, also known as Mark Rothko. Where Pollock died in a drunken car smash and Rothko by his own hand, though, Solman survived: never in thrall to a gallery, always his own man, happy to live over a kosher deli on 10th Street and Second Avenue.

Steve Harris: Improvising jazz percussionist

Saturday, 26 April 2008

'Neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious . . ." Thomas Hardy was writing about a place – Egdon Heath in his imaginary-but-real Wessex - but the words also apply uncannily well to the music of Zaum, an improvising ensemble of extraordinary power and innovation founded in Poole in Dorset (fictionalised as "Havenpool" in Hardy's Life's Little Ironies). It was in Dorchester, Hardy's "Casterbridge", that the Zaum founder and percussionist Steve Harris died, at a time when his work with the group, recently remastered and reissued in a uniform edition, was starting to receive wider recognition.

Kazuo Shiraga: Avant-garde artist who painted barefoot and hanging from a rope

Friday, 25 April 2008

The artist Jiro Yoshihara may have been a touch mean-spirited when he sniffed that Kazuo Shiraga was "nobody if he didn't paint with his feet", but history has taken much the same view. In May 1957, Shiraga, dressed in a red Pinocchio suit, suspended himself by a rope from the ceiling of a gallery in Osaka and, dangling in space, began to kick oil paint around on a piece of paper lying on the floor. The resultant image was, roughly speaking, an action painting, although of a highly specialised kind. For all that came afterwards, this was to be the genre of work for which Shiraga would be remembered, the defining moment of his art.

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