Obituaries

Eddy Arnold: Country music superstar

Eddy Arnold was arguably the most successful country singer of the 20th century. He sold an estimated 85 million records and enjoyed more than 140 US hits, 28 of them chart-toppers.

Inside Obituaries

Diana Barnato Walker: Aviator who was the first British woman to break the sound barrier

Friday, 9 May 2008

Diana Barnato Walker was one of some 154 women pilots who flew with the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during the Second World War, ferrying all manner of aircraft from factories and aircraft parks to service units all over the British Isles, often in adverse weather and with a bare sufficiency of instrumentation.

Tony Kostrzewa: Founder of Red Rhino Records

Friday, 9 May 2008

The post-punk scene of the late Seventies saw an explosion of independent labels linked to record shops. Beggars Banquet, Rough Trade and Small Wonder all started as backroom operations in London stores and respectively launched Tubeway Army, Stiff Little Fingers and The Cure.

Bebe Barron: Co-composer of the first electronic film score, for 'Forbidden Planet'

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Bebe Barron, with her husband Louis, composed "electronic tonalities" for the film Forbidden Planet (1956), the first completely electronic score for any mainstream film. This modernist score reflected both the alien nature of the science-fiction setting and the dream landscape of The Tempest, on which its story was based, when music technology was in its infancy.

Professor Graham Higman: Leading group theorist

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Graham Higman was one of the most significant British group theorists of the 20th century, alongside William Burnside and Philip Hall, succeeding his former Balliol tutor and research supervisor, Henry Whitehead, as Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Oxford University in 1960.

Mildred Loving: Civil rights pioneer

Thursday, 8 May 2008

At 2am on 11 July 1958, Mildred Loving and her husband were woken up by the local Virginia sheriff and two deputies who, acting on a tip-off, had broken into their bedroom, shining flashlights into their faces. "Who is this woman you're sleeping with?" the sheriff brusquely asked. That Mildred was Richard Loving's wife made no difference. The couple were arrested. For she was black and he was white, at a time when two dozen states across America banned such unions under anti-miscegenation laws, in Virginia's case dating back to the 17th century.

Lord Holme of Cheltenham: Lib Dem strategist who chaired the party's 1997 election campaign

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

On 4 November 1997, Richard Holme was one of the five-strong Liberal Democrat team on the Lib Dem/Labour Joint Cabinet Committee, when the Prime Minister Tony Blair concluded the meeting with an announcement that he was seeing Jane Fonda next. We were all duly impressed, which was no doubt the intention.

Robert Vesco: Fugitive from US justice for 35 years

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

The 20th century has seen its share of fraudsters, scam artists and financial thugs, but few with the swagger of Robert Vesco. By the time he was 30 he was a multi-millionaire, before he was 37 he had looted a global mutual fund and tried to bribe an incumbent American president with a suitcase stuffed with $100 bills. True, this rogue capitalist spent the last three and a half decades of his life on the run, before dying in seedy obscurity in one of the last remaining Communist states on earth. Somehow though, the glamour and the mystery never quite rubbed off.

Peta Levi: Founder of Design-Nation who was an imaginative and indomitable champion of British designers

Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Twenty-five years or so ago, British art colleges, arguably the best in Europe, if not the world, were producing skilled and original designers of furniture, ceramics, glass, lighting and textiles in increasing numbers. Surprising though it now seems, manufacturers and shops at that time were largely indifferent to such talents, and the designers who wanted to get their work out into the wider world had to go it alone. And so came about the modern phenomenon of the "designer-maker". Then, in the early Eighties, a growing bevy of eager, but widely scattered and invariably disorganised, creatives had the immeasurable luck to find themselves an imaginative, indomitable and selfless champion, Peta Levi, who was to continue to fight their corner until her death.

Yossi Harel: Commander of the 'Exodus'

Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Yossi Harel, who as a young intelligence officer in 1947 commanded the illegal immigrant boat Exodus, was one of Israel's more anonymous heroes. Until the 60th anniversary of the epic voyage that bore about 4,500 Holocaust survivors from Europe to Haifa and back, he seldom talked about his role in one of the tipping points of Zionist history.

Bernard Archard: Star of the TV series 'Spycatcher'

Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Disillusioned with the experience of regular unemployment as an actor in Britain, in 1959 Bernard Archard booked a seat on the next boat to Canada, with plans to make a new start. But then he was asked to audition for the starring role in Spycatcher, as Lt-Col Oreste Pinto, a wartime Allied counter-espionage expert.

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