One Fat Lady

Clarissa Dickson Wright, Rebel TV Chef, Dies at 66

Clarissa Dickson Wright, who rose to middle-aged fame as the co-star and co-chef of “Two Fat Ladies,” a popular British television show known as much for the hosts’ irreverence and eccentricity as for their indulgent and sometimes confounding recipes, died on Saturday in Edinburgh. She was 66.

She had been ill for several months, according to Heather Holden-Brown and Elly James, her literary agents in London, who announced the death.

Ms. Dickson Wright grew up in an affluent family, became a lawyer at 21 and an alcoholic not long after. Sobered up, she got serious about cooking in her 40s.

She was writing a cooking column and running a store called Books for Cooks in London when a television producer recruited her to collude with another culinary rebel, Jennifer Paterson, on a cooking show unlike any other. “Two Fat Ladies” made its debut in 1996 on the BBC and was picked up in the United States the next year by the Food Network.

Each episode opened with the pair heading to a new location to cook, Ms. Paterson steering a motorcycle while Ms. Dickson Wright rode in a sidecar, sometimes beneath the carcass of an animal bound for the dinner table. They spoke approvingly of royal mistresses, less so of vegetarians. They enjoyed imitating profound flatulence.

Clarissa Dickson Wright, right, and her co-star, Jennifer Paterson, on the iconoclastic 1990s cooking show “Two Fat Ladies.” Credit Associated Press

In an era of health-conscious cooking, Ms. Dickson Wright and Ms. Paterson just said no.

On lard: “Just in case you think it’s unhealthy,” Ms. Dickson Wright said, “don’t be put off by that.”

On bacon: “I’m told that more vegetarians relapse on bacon than any other substance.”

On a lofty legume: “Always get rid of all the lentils. You would have no idea how randy it makes all the vegetarians.”

On tongue: “It’s wonderful stuff, tongue. Everybody forgets about tongue.”

On flavorful Indian tea: “Yes, I quite like a strong Indian myself now and again.”

On the proper application of butter to a cake pan: “You really want to get it well greased. Did you see ‘Last Tango in Paris’? Something like that.”

Clarissa Dickson Wright was born Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright on June 24, 1947, in the St. John’s Wood section of London. In her 2007 memoir, “Spilling the Beans,” she recalled the inspirations for her numerous given names, including her mother’s favorite saint, Philomena, and a woman who cooked for her family, Louise. 

Perfect examples of enjoying life while you have the chance.

Tony Benn, veteran Labour politician

Veteran leftwing Labour politician who went from being 'the most dangerous man in Britain' to a national radical treasure

British obits make for wonderful reading, indeed.

Benn in 1961. For an American that is a great shot: the person, the Thames, Parliament.
Tony (Anthony Neil Wedgwood) Benn, politician and diarist, born 3 April 1925; died 14 March 2014

Born Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, he entered parliament in 1950 as MP for Bristol South East, becoming the youngest member of the house at the age of 25. He had to leave the Commons a decade later, as the death of his father, a Labour peer, meant he inherited the title of Viscount Stansgate. However, he campaigned for a change in the law and returned to his seat three years later after renouncing the title. During his 50-year parliamentary career, Benn served as minister for technology, industry and energy under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He also campaigned against EU membership and oversaw the development of Concorde.

After a successful cabinet career under Wilson in the 70s, he swung to the left politically and challenged Denis Healey for the Labour deputy leadership – only losing by the narrowest of margins after one of the key unions switched sides at the last minute. He then became instrumental in using Labour party machinery to develop a leftwing manifesto on which Michael Foot fought the 1983 election.

His grandfathers were Liberal MPs, as initially was his father, William Wedgwood Benn. He was one of those who went to the opposition benches with HH Asquith after the course of the first world war compelled him to resign as prime minister in 1916. Rather than stay in the Liberal party when the Asquith and David Lloyd George branches were reunified in 1923, Wedgwood Benn senior joined Labour and served as Ramsay MacDonald's India secretary (1929-31) and Clement Attlee's air secretary (1945-46). In 1942, he reluctantly gave up his Commons seat when called upon to bolster the wartime coalition's Labour contingent in the Lords, accepting a hereditary peerage as Viscount Stansgate.

After second world war service in the RAF (1943-45) he returned to Oxford, graduating in 1948, spent some time in the US, and worked as a BBC radio producer (1949-50). He was known formally as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, or Wedgie by friends and family, till in 1972 he settled on plain Tony Benn. However, the change of name could not disguise the fact that he was the product of an elite background. As he once said: "My contribution to the Labour party is that I know the British establishment inside out and what they're up to."

In 1949, he married a wealthy American, Caroline Middleton DeCamp, a socialist, educationist and biographer, and they, too, built a happy domestic life in a large house in Notting Hill, west London. Their daughter, Melissa, and three sons, Stephen, Hilary and Joshua, were all active politically, with Hilary becoming a Labour cabinet minister. Caroline's wealth matched Benn's own inherited capital, derived from the Benn Brothers publishing firm.

The General

This one is back from 2005, but he is one of my favourites.

Ronald William George Barker was born at Bedford on September 25 1929 and brought up in Oxford. From Donnington Junior School he went on to Oxford High School, where he opened his chemistry textbook to find the name TE Lawrence inscribed on the flyleaf.

Barker continued to apply for jobs advertised in the Stage, one of which brought a two-year spell in rep at Bramhall, after which he joined the Oxford Playhouse, where he met the young Maggie Smith - and told her: "If I were you, I'd give up."

Chronicler of History

Tony Judt, the author of “Postwar,” a monumental history of Europe after World War II, and a public intellectual known for his sharply polemical essays on American foreign policy, the state of Israel and the future of Europe, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 62.

The death was announced in a statement from New York University, where he had taught for many years. The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which he learned he had in September 2008. In a matter of months the disease left him paralyzed and able to breathe only with mechanical assistance, but he continued to lecture and write.

“In effect,” Mr. Judt wrote in an essay published in January in The New York Review of Books, “A.L.S. constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole.”

Mr. Judt (pronounced Jutt), who was British by birth and education but who taught at American universities for most of his career, began as a specialist in postwar French intellectual history, and for much of his life he embodied the idea of the French-style engaged intellectual.

An impassioned left-wing Zionist as a teenager, he shed his faith in agrarian socialism and Marxism early on and became, as he put it, a “universalist social democrat” with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.

His developing interest in Europe as a whole, including the states of the former Eastern Bloc, led him to take an active role in the developing Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia; it culminated in “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945” (2005), a sweeping, richly detailed survey embracing countries from Britain to the Balkans that, in the words of one reviewer, has “the pace of a thriller and the scope of an encyclopedia.”

Mr. Judt was perhaps best known for his essays on politics and current affairs in journals like The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books.

“He had the unusual ability to see and convey the big picture while, at the same time, going to the heart of the matter,” said Mark Lilla, who teaches intellectual history at Columbia University. “Most academics do neither — they float in between. But Tony was able to talk about the big picture and explain why it matters now.”

Tony Robert Judt was born in the East End of London on Jan. 2, 1948, and grew up in Putney. His parents, although secular and apolitical Jews, encouraged him to join the Labor Zionist youth organization Dror as a way to meet friends. He became a fervent convert to the cause, spending several summers working on a kibbutz in Israel and serving as the organization’s national secretary from 1965 to 1967.

“I was the ideal recruit: articulate, committed and uncompromisingly ideologically conformist,” he wrote in an autobiographical sketch for The New York Review of Books in February.

After he passed the entrance examinations to King’s College, Cambridge, he volunteered as an auxiliary with the Israeli Defense Forces during the Six-Day War, acting as an interpreter for other volunteers in the newly conquered Golan Heights. There he lost faith in the Zionist mission and began to see Israel as a malign occupying power whose self-definition as a Jewish state, he later argued, made it “an anachronism.”

Mr. Judt returned to Britain disabused and highly skeptical of the radical political currents swirling around him at Cambridge, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history from King’s College in 1969. After studying for a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he returned to King’s College and earned a doctorate in 1972.

His dissertation, on the French socialist party’s re-emergence after World War I, was published in France as “La Reconstruction du Parti Socialiste: 1921-1926” (1976). In 1979 he followed up with “Socialism in Provence, 1871-1914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left,” and in 1986 he published “Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981.”

These relatively specialist works led to two interpretive studies of French postwar intellectual life: “Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956” (1994) and “The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century” (1998).

Casting his lot with the nonideological liberals, like Raymond Aron and Albert Camus, who dared to criticize the Soviet Union and third-world revolutionary movements, he subjected Sartre and others to a withering critique that came as a shock to many French and American intellectuals. His target, he wrote, was “the uneasy conscience and moral cowardice of an intellectual generation.”

Fluidly written, with a strong narrative drive and an insistent, polemical edge, both books established Mr. Judt as a historian whose ability to see the present in the past gave his work an unusual air of immediacy. Increasingly he inclined toward free-ranging inquiry across disciplines, pursuing a wide range of his interests reflected in the essay collection “Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century” (2008).

“A historian also has to be an anthropologist, also has to be a philosopher, also has to be a moralist, also has to understand the economics of the period he is writing about,” he told the online magazine Historically Speaking in 2006. “Though they are often arbitrary, disciplinary boundaries certainly exist. Nevertheless, the historian has to learn to transcend them in order to write intelligently.”

In 1987, after teaching at Cambridge, the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford, he began teaching at N.Y.U. There, in 1995, he helped found the Remarque Institute with a bequest from Paulette Goddard, the widow of the writer Erich Maria Remarque. Under his directorship, it became an important international center for the study of Europe, past and present. His skepticism about the future of the European Union found expression in a sharply polemical, pamphlet-length book, “A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe” (1996).

His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the dance critic Jennifer Homans, and their two sons, Daniel and Nicholas.

His views on Israel made Mr. Judt an increasingly polarizing figure. He placed himself in the midst of a bitter debate when, in 2003, he outlined a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem in The New York Review of Books, proposing that Israel accept a future as a secular, bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.

In 2006, a scheduled talk at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan was abruptly canceled for reasons later hotly disputed, but apparently under pressure, explicit or implicit, from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, told The New York Observer at the time that Mr. Judt, on Israel, “has become precisely the kind of intellectual whom his intellectual heroes would have despised.” Mr. Judt’s name had been removed from the masthead of the magazine, where he had been a contributing editor, after his article on the one-state solution.

Mr. Judt expressed some surprise that he should be defined by his position on one issue and expressed distaste for public controversy, while showing an unmistakable relish for the cut and thrust of public debate.

“Today I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney-tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I’m regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist,” he told The Guardian of London in January 2010. “I like that. I’m on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable.”

His discovery in 2008 that he had Lou Gehrig’s disease did not deter him from his work. He continued to write and lecture.

Last October, wrapped in a blanket and sitting in a wheelchair with a breathing device attached to his nose, Mr. Judt spoke about social democracy before an audience of 700 at N.Y.U. He turned that lecture into a small book, “Ill Fares the Land,” published in March by Penguin Press.

During the lecture, his last public appearance, he told the audience that some of his American friends felt that seeing him talk about A.L.S. would be uplifting. But he added, “I’m English, and we don’t do ‘uplifting.’ ”

He did write about his illness, however. In an essay in The New York Review of Books in January, he wrote, “In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.”

History remained uppermost in his mind, though. In “Ill Fares the Land,” he turned his attention to a problem he regarded as acute: the loss of faith in social democracy, and the power of the state to do good, that had brought prosperity to so many European countries after World War II.

“The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly,” he told Historically Speaking. “A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.”

August 7, 2010

Tony Judt, Chronicler of History, Is Dead at 62

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Obituaries editor obit

As obituaries editor, Keith Colquhoun turned each life into an elegant short story – and put the boot in when needed

* Sara Lupino Lane
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 July 2010 17.45 BST


My husband, Keith Colquhoun, who has died aged 82 of prostate cancer, worked almost continuously as a journalist for 60 years. He also had a parallel career as a novelist, writing 11 well-regarded books, which achieved for him esteem rather than the more concrete joys of financial success. He published his most recent novel, Five Deadly Words, this year. He also had an unwanted place in a 1970s scandal, when his first wife, Maureen, then Labour MP for Northampton North, went off in a blaze of publicity with a woman.

Keith started his career on the West Sussex County Times and then moved to the Evening Argus in Brighton. His first job in Fleet Street was with the Daily Herald. Later, he moved into magazine journalism, working as managing editor for the Observer Colour Magazine, where we met. He moved to Hong Kong, where he worked as chief subeditor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.

On his return to London in 1982, he worked at the Economist for 20 years. As Asia editor, he interviewed prime ministers, presidents and business leaders. He then became obituaries editor, where he used his talents to turn each life into an elegant short story, drawing on his knowledge of politics, history and current affairs, combined with a peerless ability to put the boot in, when needed. He left the Economist at the age of 75 and carried on working as a journalist, based in Paris and Brussels.

Keith said that the best way to get through life was to be reasonably happy with what you did, which he had been. He is survived by three children, Andrew, Mary and Edward, from his marriage to Maureen, and by me and our children, Jessie, Toby and Grace, as well as six grandchildren and one great-grandson.

Great Escape

Jack Harrison: wartime bomber pilot and Stalag Luft III PoW [London Times obituary]

An RAF bomber pilot who was shot down in 1942 on his first raid over enemy-occupied Europe, Jack Harrison became part of the team that planned and executed the “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III in 1944.

The breakout, from the camp in Silesia in March 1944, was the culmination of more than two months of feverish tunnelling, which involved the digging of three tunnels, christened “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry”, the longest of which, Harry, was eventually selected for the attempt.

On the night of March 24, in the bitter Silesian winter, Harrison was 98th on the list of 200 PoWs who were lined up to crawl through Harry, surface from the tunnel outside the perimeter wire and get to the cover of the dense pine forests that surrounded Stalag Luft III. In the event 76 prisoners had made it through the tunnel when, as bad luck would have it, one of the guards outside the perimeter wire momentarily left the path he was supposed to be patrolling on sentry duty in order to attend to the wants of nature. He stumbled into the open exit hole and fired a warning shot into the air.

As pre-arranged, those who were still in the tunnel got out and returned to their huts, destroying all the documents that had been forged to give them cover for their attempt to get to coasts and frontiers. Only three of those who escaped from the camp made it back to the UK. Two Norwegians managed to get to the Baltic coast and thence by boat to neutral Sweden, while a Dutchman escaped through France and Spain. The remaining 73 were recaptured.

The Great Escape was to have a tragic sequel. Enraged by the audacity and scale of the attempt from one of the Reich’s most inaccessible PoW camps Hitler ordered, in defiance of the laws of war, that an example should be made of the Stalag Luft III escapers. Of those recaptured 50 were shot by the Gestapo on his orders, a crime depicted in the film The Great Escape (1963), directed by John Sturges and starring Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson and Donald Pleasance.

[Ed: one of the all-time great films. A favourite. But, Bronson gets mentioned and James Garner doesn't?]


Jack Harrison was born in 1912 and was teaching Latin at Dornoch Academy in Sutherland when the Second World War broke out in 1939. Called up into the RAF he was posted to Bomber Command after basic pilot training and commissioned as a flying officer. His aircraft was hit by flak on his first operation, an attack on the Dutch port of Den Helder in November 1942.

Harrison was forced to ditch in the sea off the Dutch coast and was captured by the Germans. After being held in a number of camps he was sent to Stalag Luft III at Sagan, one of Germany’s largest PoW facilities, holding almost 10,000 air force officers from the RAF, US Army Air Forces and other Allied air forces. During the preparation for the Great Escape Harrison, one of the camp’s gardeners, was among assistants to the plan’s mastermind, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, helping to dispose of dirt from the tunnels.

[That is a great scene in the film, when they bring the dirt out to the garden.]

The first 30 of those chosen to make the escape attempt were selected for their fluent German, which would give them the best chance of avoiding detection while attempting a “home run”. The next 70 had all worked on one or other of the tunnels and were acquainted with the conditions, and the last 100 were chosen out of a hat from 500 volunteers.

Harrison had acquired a working knowledge of German, though he was by no means fluent, and was to adopt the guise of a Hungarian electrician working for the German engineering company Siemens. He was in Block 104 waiting for the call to the tunnel when the remainder of the escape had to be aborted. He quickly burnt his forged identity papers and got out of the disguise he was to have escaped in. He remained at Stalag Luft II until the camp was evacuated as the Red Army drew near the eastern frontiers of the Reich.

When the war ended he returned to his wife, whom he had married in 1943, and resumed his teaching career, moving in 1958 to Rothsay where he was appointed director of education for the Isle of Bute. He retired in 1975.

His wife, Jean, predeceased him and he is survived by a son and a daughter.

Jack Harrison, wartime bomber pilot and Stalag Luft III PoW, was born on December 18, 1912. He died on June 4, 2010, aged 97

David Vilaseca

An exiled authority on Hispanic culture, he homed in on identity

David Vilaseca, who has died aged 46, after being run over by a skip lorry as he rode his bicycle near his home at London Bridge, was a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, who specialised in Hispanic studies and critical theory. He wrote two major books and a string of brilliant articles over the course of some 20 years.

Skip lorry seems to be a sort of tow truck.

As an authority on Spanish and Catalan culture, he produced original and innovative studies of a number of writers, mostly gay, and exiles from their native land or language. Himself a proud and openly gay man who had made his life in London rather than his native Barcelona, David clearly had a personal interest in such figures. But as a master in the demanding school of poststructuralist thought, especially psychoanalysis and queer theory, he was an impeccable scholar. His central theme was that identity was unstable and the limits between self and other difficult, if not impossible, to draw. It was a theme he would also explore in a prizewinning novel.

David took his first degree in philology in 1987 at Barcelona's Autonomous University before studying for an MA at Bloomington, Indiana, in 1989. I supervised his PhD, awarded at Queen Mary, University of London, in just three years (1992), in spite of the fact that he had a full teaching load as a language assistant. He then returned to teach at his home university. Finding the British system more receptive to his research, he came back to a lectureship at Southampton University in 1994 before moving to Royal Holloway as senior lecturer in 2000 with rapid promotion to professor of Hispanic studies and critical theory in 2003.

Salvador Dalí, whose autobiography was written in several, indecipherable hands and in a macaronic mix of languages, was clearly a perfect match for David's deconstructive approach. His first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalí's vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."

Bizarre episodes in Dalí's autobiography suddenly made sense in David's subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate.

While David's first book had on its cover a youthful Dalí, proudly posing in a turban, the second, Hindsight and the Real: Subjectivity in Gay Hispanic Autobiography (2003), boasted Johnny Depp in full drag from the film version of Before Night Falls, the autobiography of the Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas.

Typically, David's accounts of Spanish, Catalan and Hispanic writers could prove unsettling to scholars and activists alike. Thus, he showed convincingly that Arenas actively constructed an image of himself as a person with HIV/Aids, even as that identity was imposed upon him; and that the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo came to identify himself as a homosexual only when told as much by his mentor, Jean Genet. This was a fine example of the "hindsight" of David's title, the way in which retrospectively we build narratives of ourselves, telling tales that are never simple or single.

It was perhaps a surprise that such a private person as David should publish a novel that was clearly autobiographical in origin. L'Aprenentatge de la Soledat (The Apprenticeship of Solitude), composed in diary format, is the story of a gay Catalan living in the London which David loved. While it would be naive to take the novel as a personal revelation (David worked for years on stylistic revisions of his text), it charts with disconcerting objectivity love and sex in the capital. Lengthy and controversial, it marked David's return to the Catalan language and won him the 2007 Octubre prize for Catalan fiction.

David wrote that, as in the continuing relationship between patient and psychoanalyst, Dalí's autobiography was "part of a love story which has clearly not come to an end". This is also true of his own writing. A third academic book, Negotiating the Event, will be published this autumn.

David is survived by his mother, Marina, his sister, Marta, and the many friends who loved him.
• David Vilaseca, Hispanic scholar, born 6 February 1964; died 9 February 2010
* Paul Julian Smith
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 March 2010 18.45 GMT 

Paul Julian Smith is the author of Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Verso), Amores Perros (BFI Modern Classics) and Television in Spain (Boydell and Brewer). He is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound

Decorated heroine of the French Resistance

Andrée Peel, who died on March 5 aged 105, was a much-decorated heroine of the French Resistance; known as Agent Rose, she helped dozens of British and American pilots escape from occupied Europe and only escaped death at the hands of the Nazis by the skin of her teeth.

When the Germans invaded France, Andrée Virot, as she then was, was in her mid 30s and running her own beauty salon in the Breton port of Brest. Her first act of defiance took place as German troops entered the town, when she gave shelter to a group of fleeing French soldiers and begged her neighbours for civilian clothes for them so they would not be captured. She was subsequently amazed – and disconcerted – to find that German soldiers of all ranks had been taught fluent French and that some even spoke Breton.


When General de Gaulle declared in his famous broadcast of June 18 1940 that "France has lost a battle, but she has not lost the war," Andrée and some friends got together to type out the message and slip copies through people's letterboxes. She soon became involved in the Resistance, circulating the organisation's clandestine newspaper. Within weeks she was made head of an under-section of the organisation, responsible for sending information to the Allies.


Brest was an important naval base, and information about shipping movements was vital to the Allied war effort. By establishing contacts in the dockyard, Andrée was able to pass on information about naval installations, as well as about troop movements and the results of Allied aerial attacks. These were mainly directed at the harbour area, but many bombs missed their target and fell on the town. No one blamed the Allies. She recalled one man whose house had been destroyed leaping with joy when he found that his precious radio, on which he listened to the BBC, had survived intact. On another occasion she came across a group of teenage boys singing "What joy, Tommy, now that we are united at last" to a well known tune, as British bombs rained all around.

Joy at bombs falling; a better alternative to Nazism.


During her three years with the Resistance – during which she was known first as Agent X and then as Agent Rose – Andrée helped save the lives of more than 100 Allied pilots. Her team used torches to guide Allied planes to improvised landing strips and smuggled fugitive airmen aboard submarines and gunboats on remote parts of the coast, often feeling their way in the dark past German coastal shelters. The work was extremely dangerous. Any family found harbouring an Allied airman risked being shot and in 1943 Andrée herself was forced to leave Brest after a comrade (who had been forced to watch his family being tortured by the Gestapo) informed on her.

She fled to Paris and assumed another identity, but a week after D-Day she was again betrayed by a comrade, who confessed under torture. She was arrested and taken to Gestapo headquarters where she was stripped naked, interrogated and subjected to a series of tortures, including simulated drowning and being savagely beaten around the throat. As a result her gullet was displaced and her tonsils crushed. She continued to suffer pain for the rest of her life.

Simulated drowning = waterboarding.

Eventually she and other prisoners were transported to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück where, on arrival, they were forced to strip and frogmarched into what she later realised was a gas chamber. She never discovered why they were released since many others lost their lives. She noticed later that the camp did a brisk trade with local farmers who bought the ash from the camp crematorium to spread on their fields.

Human ash as fertilizer.


Andrée narrowly escaped death on several more occasions. She fell ill with what a doctor told her was meningitis, but recovered. Then, during the daily roll call, she was selected for the gas chamber but was saved by a Polish fellow inmate who crept up to a table and snatched up the piece of paper with Andrée's number on it without being seen by the SS. Eventually she was transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp where life seemed easier, initially at least, and she was able to send messages to her family in Brest via French prisoners-of-war working in the fields outside.


But, as the Allies closed in towards the end of April 1945, it became obvious that the Nazis were determined to obliterate evidence of their crimes. By the time she and a group of fellow prisoners were lined up against a wall, they had heard that some prisoners had been shot and others killed with flame throwers, so they had little doubt what was in store. As a firing squad drew near, she wrote later, the terrified prisoners heard a telephone ringing in the camp commandant's office. It was a message from the Americans to the effect that the firing squad had been seen entering the camp and that if they wanted to live, they would spare the lives of the prisoners. The soldiers fled.


Andrée Peel was awarded the Croix de Guerre (with palm), the Croix de Guerre (silver star), the Cross of the Voluntary Fighter, the Medal of the Resistance, the Liberation Cross – all French awards – as well as the American Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Eisenhower, and the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct, given by George VI. After the war she received a personal letter from Winston Churchill congratulating her on her work. Much later, at age of 99, she was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, France's highest honour, receiving the award from her own brother, General Maurice Virot, a retired four-star general.


After her release from Buchenwald, Andrée returned to Paris where she was welcomed by crowds singing the Marseillaise, and fulfilled a promise made in 1944 to make a pilgrimage to the Sacré Coeur church in Montmartre to thank God for her deliverance.


Andrée Marthe Virot was born on February 3 1905 into a religious and deeply patriotic French family. Her father was a civil engineer who specialised in building bridges. When she returned to a devastated Brest after the war, she learned that he had been killed after walking too close to a German soldier who was fishing using hand grenades. A brother had also lost his life in Germany while fighting in the ranks of the Free French. She returned to Paris where she became the manager of La Caravelle, a restaurant near the Luxembourg Gardens specialising in "first class cuisine at acceptable prices". News that she was a former Resistance worker attracted many clients including leading politicians and former Allied servicemen.


One day a young English student called John Peel came into the restaurant. He was supposed to be learning French, but his accent was so comical that Andrée offered to give him lessons. Though he was 20 years her junior, a relationship developed, and they ended up getting married. Her husband made his career as a neuropsychologist at Barrow Gurney mental hospital in Bristol and they settled in a village nearby. Andrée always felt she had been born with a special gift: "Very often I could feel a kind of electric current at my fingertips, sometimes extremely hot, and this current passed out of my hands into the air. When I wanted to concentrate it and intensify it, my wish was granted". In Bristol she laid her "electric" hands on a woman who had been injured after stumbling on the stairs and discovered she had the gift of healing. "My future path had opened in front of me as if I had been guided thereto by some divine order," she recalled. She established herself as a healer and dietitian, building up a faithful list of clients.


Though Andrée Peel always kept the striped blue-and-grey tunic she had been forced to wear in the concentration camps, she never intended to write a book about her experiences until it was suggested that by doing so she would be telling the stories of those who had not survived. Her autobiography, Miracles do Happen, appeared in 1999. When she celebrated her centenary, Andrée Peel said: "I still feel like a woman of 50. I think that time has forgotten me." The secret to a happy life, she observed, was a good companion – and eating the main meal of the day at lunchtime. Her husband predeceased her.


Published: 7:11PM GMT 09 Mar 2010

the finest Greek scholar of his generation

British somehow seem to outdo USers with the spice of their obituaries: how they're written, and those that they are written about. Case in point, this one of Kenneth Dover. A few things caught my eye, beginning with the photograph.

Dover as Chancellor of St Andrews University presenting Bob Dylan with an honorary degree in 2004 Photo: PA 


Sir Kenneth Dover, who died on March 7 aged 89, was considered the finest Greek scholar of his generation and seemed to have led a life of almost oppressive decorum, crowned in 1978 by his election as President of the British Academy.

Published: 6:25PM GMT 08 Mar 2010

But in 1994 he published an autobiography, Marginal Comment, which deliberately shattered the image. The book portrayed a spikily intelligent man who was slave to an urge to demonstrate his emancipation from bourgeois constraints. The reader is not spared the least detail of Dover's sex life, right down to the culminating horror that at 64 he and his wife enjoyed "some of the best ----- of our life". But the issue which caught the headlines was his account of his attitude to Trevor Aston, a History fellow at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where Dover had been President between 1976 and 1986. Aston's disintegration into paranoia and alcoholism had proved a serious embarrassment to the college; Dover confessed to having thought long and hard about how to murder him.

"It was clear to me," wrote Dover, "that Trevor and the College must somehow be separated, and my problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candour: how to kill him without getting into trouble." In fact, as the text reveals, Dover acted impeccably towards Aston, who was bent on self-destruction and eventually committed suicide. What was less clear is why the author should have been the victim of an adolescent desire to shock. But that was to misunderstand Dover's almost brutal passion for honesty. When he was interviewed on radio by the psychiatrist Anthony Clare shortly after the book's publication, it became obvious that Clare had never met anyone with such a commitment to telling the truth about himself, however discreditable; indeed, so disoriented was Clare by the encounter that towards the end it seemed as if Dover was the one doing the interviewing.

This passion for honesty, especially on sexual matters, was to inform Dover's whole career and cause him considerable trouble. Because his commentary on Aristophanes' Clouds (1968) was the first to go into detail about the physiology and psychology of the play's sexual jokes, it was greeted frostily in many quarters, as if it demonstrated Dover were some kind of pervert.

That is quite interesting; makes me want to re-read the work, to see if I can discern what he meant.

He realised the sensitivities of his subject and carefully prefaced his epoch-making Greek Homosexuality (1978), the first and best scholarly study of the subject, with the words: "No argument which purports to show that homosexuality in general is natural or unnatural, healthy or morbid, legal or illegal, in conformity with God's will or contrary to it, tells me whether any particular homosexual act is morally right or morally wrong. No act is sanctified, and none is debased, simply by having a genital dimension."

Interesting way of puting it. Certainly homosexuality is in Aristophanes's work, though, as I recall, he made fun of it.

It made no difference. Some parts of the gay community immediately assumed that, because he showed the Greeks were hostile to sex between bearded males, Dover was somehow attacking contemporary homosexual practice. A Californian gay magazine, meanwhile, began its review of the book with the words "The well-known British homosexual Sir Kenneth Dover … " Dover considered suing, but was advised against.

Kenneth James Dover was born on March 11 1920. His father had a safe job in the lower echelons of the Civil Service, from which he was invalided out in 1946; his mother, a teacher's daughter,  Dover despised his father, but his mother's reason and honesty was to have a profound influence on him.

submitted with rational good humour to her husband's uncertain temper.. What US obituarist can turn that kind of phrase?

The infant Kenneth was precocious and could read at three; his first passion was for insects. At St Paul's he became competent in Latin and fell in love with Greek. He also consciously cultivated, as he explained, a stoicism impermeable to his own and other people's emotions, a project in which he regretfully admitted to being "a little too successful". Dover's cold rationalism could certainly make him seem a forbidding figure and occasionally a risible one. He went up to Balliol in 1938 where he took a first in Mods and won the Gaisford Prize for Greek verse in his first year. Soon after starting Greats he was commissioned and in March 1941 joined the Eighth Army in the desert war. After landing at Salerno in September 1943, Dover remained in Italy for the rest of the war, taking part in the final battle at Cassino. Though mentioned in despatches, he never rose above the rank of lieutenant.

Back in Oxford, Dover took a First, won a Harmsworth Senior Fellowship at Merton and in 1948 was elected to a Balliol fellowship and lectureship at Wadham. This was the start of a career that was to take him to the chair of Greek at St Andrews (1955-76), the Presidency of Corpus Christi, Oxford (1976-86), and would light up the classical world. For Dover, problems about the Greek world could be solved only by being a perfectionist in matters of language and willing to make use of the experiences of other cultures. It was the application of these principles to a vast range of scholarly problems under the guidance of his diamond-hard intellect that made him unmatched in the world of Greek scholarship.

Prose and poetry, history and literature, detailed textual commentaries and wide-ranging social analyses were all part and parcel of an intellectual existence that he found constantly gripping and which he was only too willing to share with others – scholars, sixth-formers and beginners at Greek summer schools alike (Dover wrote a beginners' Greek course for use at St Andrews). He once admitted that he had never been bored for more than five seconds in the whole of his life.

How lucky.

Of the eight Greek literary genres, Dover produced definitive work in articles and books on seven (only missing out the epic). He wrote commentaries on the historian Thucydides (from 1965-81), the comic poet Aristophanes (Clouds, 1968, Frogs, 1993, and Aristophanic Comedy in 1972), the pastoral poet Theocritus (1971) and the philosopher Plato (Symposium, 1980). This last was not well received, since Dover regarded arguments about metaphysics as a waste of precious time. Greek Word Order was published in 1960, followed by his Sather lectures on the rhetorician Lysias in 1968. There were general books on The Greeks, arising from a television series; Ancient Greek Literature (with others) in 1980; and The Evolution of Greek Prose Style in 1997.

The book that pleased Dover most was his Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (1974), a brilliant analysis of what the Greek man on the Sunium omnibus thought about, inter alia, human nature, the environment (a topic close to Dover's heart), heredity, age, sex, status, moral responsibility, death, money, the gods, inequality, the state, and so on, full of characteristically sharp Doverian asides on the modern world's response to the same issues. His collected papers – Greek and the Greeks and The Greeks and Their Legacy – appeared in 1987-88.


In 1976 Dover was lured back to Oxford as President of Corpus Christi. Never one to duck administrative responsibilities, he had already been President of the Hellenic Society (1971-4) and of the Classical Association (1975) and chairman and co-editor of various classical journals and their boards. In 1983 he chaired the committee on undergraduate admissions at Oxford.


Dover had been elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1966 and was President (1978-81) when Sir Anthony Blunt was exposed as a traitor and the question arose as to whether he should be expelled. Dover tried with only partial success to hold the ring between competing factions within the Academy but the problem solved itself when Blunt resigned. For Dover, who privately thought expulsion could be justified on the grounds that Blunt had transferred his allegiance to a government hostile to the pursuit of scholarship, the whole affair was "absorbingly interesting and therefore intensely enjoyable".


In 1981, while still President of Corpus, Dover was appointed to the ceremonial position of Chancellor of St Andrews, where he returned to the family home after retiring from Corpus in 1986. Always an eager academic traveller, Dover was welcomed all over the scholarly world. During a sabbatical in 1982 he lectured in Princeton, Toronto, Melbourne, Tokyo and Beijing, and later held posts as "Professor at Large" at Cornell (1984-9) and Professor of Classics (Winter Quarter) at Stanford (1988-92). He was much impressed by the intelligence and liveliness of American classical postgraduates.


Kenneth Dover was knighted in 1977. He married, in 1947, Audrey Latimer; they had a son and a daughter.

Michael Foot

Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images - Former Labour Party leader Michael Foot in 1974.

Obituaries of this Englishman appear, of course, not only in the UK press, but also on this side of the Pond. So far, the only media outlet to cover it is the Wall Street Journal, which published the AP story on its website.

The Times of London: Erudite Socialist who sparkled as a journalist and thundered as a political orator but fizzled damply as a leader of the Labour Party. The Independent: Michael Foot: Leftwing fighter who led Labour to poll collapse. The Telegraph: Labour leader of extraordinary energy, ability and vision who none the less struggled to unite his party and overcome his image of frailty. Telegraph also has a video tribute.
Michael Foot: life in video. The New York Times's obit finally appeared today, though it is dated yesterday. It has a wonderful picture of Foot with a quite-young Tony Blair. On Thursday 4 March a video tribute to Foot from current PM Brown appeared. Look at this one for a quick glimpse of Brown with long hair.

Press Association, via Associated Press - Michael Foot in 1982 with Tony Blair, who went on to become prime minister of Britain. Mr. Foot led Labour in the early '80s.

At the very beginning the two obituaries state their cases: the Guardian refers to him as Principled leader who held Labour together in the early 1980s, and a writer devoted to the cause of freedom. The AP starts: Michael Foot, a bookish intellectual and antinuclear campaigner who led Britain's Labour Party to a disastrous defeat in 1983, died Wednesday morning, officials said. He was 96. Mr. Foot personified the socialist tendency in the Labour Party, which Tony Blair successfully erased when he won power at the head of a business-friendly, interventionist "New Labour." Yet Mr. Foot remained a respected, even revered, figure.

That was at noon. Now, at 5.30pm, the headline has changed: Former Labour leader Michael Foot dies. Labour party leader between 1980 and 1983 dies aged 96. Nonetheless ...

Michael Foot, the most improbable literary romantic to lead a major British party since Benjamin Disraeli, has died at the age of 96 after a turbulent political career that left him a much-loved but also deeply controversial figure. A brilliant orator, steeped in Swift, Byron, Shelley and the great political struggles of the 17th century, Foot was first an incorrigible rebel who helped foster the left-right Bevanite split that damaged Labour throughout the 50s. A champion of British unilateral nuclear disarmament, one of the left's great postwar causes, he gradually moved towards office in the economic crisis of 1974. Foot led Labour from 1980 to 1983, presiding over the party during the formation of the breakaway SDP. He resigned after Labour fell to a stunning defeat in the 1983 election, the voters having rejected a manifesto later called the "longest suicide note in history".

In the AP obit: Industrial unrest spread in Britain in the late 1970s, and Mr. Callaghan resigned from the Labour party in 1980 -- one year after Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party came to power. As Labour lurched to the left, Mr. Foot was elected as a compromise candidate. By the 1983 election, Labour's left-wing militants had gained strength and shaped what would become a disastrous manifesto, memorably described by Labour MP Gerald Kaufman as "the longest suicide note in history."


In a statement, Gordon Brown said: "Michael Foot was a man of deep principle and passionate idealism and one of the most eloquent speakers Britain has ever heard. "He was an indomitable figure who always stood up for his beliefs and whether people agreed with him or not they admired his character and his steadfastness." Tony Benn, his cabinet colleague and occasional nemesis, added: "He was one of the great figures of the Labour movement."

The AP obit has this, first praise from PM Gordon Brown:  "He was an indomitable figure who always stood up for his beliefs and whether people agreed with him or not they admired his character and his steadfastness," Mr. Brown said in a statement. U.K. opposition Conservative Party leader Mr. David Cameron also paid tribute, describing Mr. Foot as "the last link to a more heroic age in politics."

A shambling figure, Mr. Foot was an honors graduate in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University. He first made his mark as the anonymous co-author of "Guilty Men," published in 1940, which attacked the Conservative Party's policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. In 1945, he was elected to parliament, representing the seat of Plymouth Devonport.

Shambling: walking with a slow dragging motion without lifting your feet

Foot's gallant reputation and prestige kept the left and the unions on side during his time as Jim Callaghan's deputy PM in difficult years from 1976 to 1979. He was also accused of irresponsibility and – ironically in view of his past – of appeasement of the unions by resurgent Conservatives and some Labour MPs. For others his idealism, which included a life-long devotion to Plymouth Argyle FC, was highly attractive. Despite the defeat of many of his most cherished causes, he had a rich and deeply fulfilled life, which he shared, until her death in 1999, with his beloved wife, the filmmaker Jill Craigie.


In the crisis that followed the defeat of the Callaghan government and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, Foot led the Labour party from 1980 to 1983, presiding over it during the formation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP), which used his election over Denis Healey as the excuse for their defection. He stepped down in favour of his protege Neil Kinnock after Labour slumped to a stunning 145-seat defeat in the 1983 election in the wake of a manifesto that a Labour colleague called "the longest suicide note in history". It fell to Kinnock to rebuild his party and put it on the road to three election wins under Tony Blair. Foot, who refused all honours including a peerage, must often have been unhappy with Blair's leadership, but in old age loyalty to his party was a paramount consideration.

AP has this: Lady Thatcher, who defeated Mr. Foot in the 1983 election, said in her memoirs that Mr. Foot's policies offered "an umbrella beneath which sinister revolutionaries, intent on destroying the institutions of the state and the values of society, were able to shelter." Still, she described him as a gentleman, "a highly principled and cultivated man, invariably courteous in our dealings. In debate and on the (campaign) platform he has a kind of genius."

NYT has this paragraph about his victory as Labour leader in 1980: It was a particularly inauspicious moment for the party. James Callaghan, his predecessor, had been soundly defeated in the 1979 general election by Lady Thatcher after the notorious “winter of discontent.” Widespread strikes, interrupted public services and rising inflation and unemployment had inspired the succinct and effective Conservative message, emblazoned on its campaign posters: “Labour Isn’t Working.”

And:  On being elected, Mr. Foot announced his intention to unite Labour “on the matters of supreme importance to us — economic policy, domestic policy — and to attack the outrages and infamies which this government is inflicting on our people.” He then quoted his mentor, the left-wing Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s National Health Service: “Never underestimate the passion for unity in the party, and never forget that it is the decent instinct of people who want to do something.” Unity never arrived. The party’s left wing engineered a change in the governing rules to give the trade unions and local party organizations a determining voice in choosing the party’s leader. In response, moderate Labourites led by Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and William Rodgers — the Gang of Four — split from the party to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981. Two dozen Labour members of Parliament followed.

I've read two books by Roy Jenkins: biographies of Churchill and Gladstone.

The NYT obituary continues with an example of Foot's oratorical prowress:  In the 1983 general election, he campaigned on a Labour platform that included unilateral disarmament, higher taxes, a more interventionist industrial policy, nationalization of the banks and abolition of the House of Lords. “We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress,” he declared in a campaign speech. “No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer, ‘To hell with them.’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.” 

It was not always so. The frail child of a West Country Liberal dynasty, Foot was always a rebel, who hitched his star early to the charismatic Welsh ex-miner, Aneurin Bevan, whose admiring biographer he became. Their radical socialist views did not prevent either of them becoming allies of Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press tycoon, owner of the then-mighty Daily Express, who shared their sense of mischief.

A distinguished writer and journalist with a passion for literature as well as politics, Foot gained his first great claim to fame as the author of Guilty Men, the celebrated polemic against the prewar appeasers in 1940. Beaverbrook entered Churchill's cabinet, Bevan attacked Churchill, and Foot briefly edited Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard – though the leftwing weekly Tribune was his life's love. Tribune helped set the tone for Labour's victory in 1945 when Foot, alone in his Liberal family, unexpectedly won Plymouth Devonport for Labour and became a Westminster gadfly. It was a role he maintained from outside after losing Devonport in 1955 and resumed after succeeding Bevan in Ebbw Vale after his hero's death in 1960.

Foot and Bevan fell out over Bevan's renunciation of unilateralism. But Foot followed his mighty heart for much of his career. His firm support of Indian independence led him to back his friend Indira Gandhi when she declared a state of emergency in the 70s. In the 60s he joined forces with Enoch Powell, with whom he shared the title of best parliamentary orator, to block Labour efforts to reform the Lords – though he wanted it abolished, Powell wanted it left untouched.


Such quixotic behaviour prompted his old Oxford friend Barbara Castle to complain that he had "grown soft on a diet of soft options". But when Labour unexpectedly took power again in the global energy crisis – and domestic crisis between Ted Heath's government and the miners – Foot accepted the tough job of employment secretary under Harold Wilson. Under Jim Callaghan, as Labour lost its majority after 1977, he was leader of the Commons and deputy PM, fighting night after night to keep the government afloat. Among his many gallant defeats of that period was the campaign in which seven cabinet ministers, including Foot, were allowed to fight for a "no" vote when Wilson offered voters a referendum on Britain's still-new EU membership in 1975. The yes camp – which included Margaret Thatcher – won by a ratio of 2:1.


He and Benn were not peas in the same pod and Foot felt personally betrayed when Benn insisted on contesting Healey's role as deputy Labour leader in 1981 – a divisive contest that Healey narrowly won when young leftwingers like Kinnock refused to back Benn.

Peas in the same pod; interesting variation of our two peas in a pod.

After his leadership Foot stayed in the Commons backing Kinnock against Militant entryism for which his earlier tolerance had been criticised, until 1992 when his protege lost the general election to John Major. But his passion for books, as for Plymouth Argyle, never dimmed as the infirmities of old age took their toll. In the bloody 90s when Yugoslavia was torn by civil war Michael and Jill Foot went there and made a film on behalf of their beloved Dubrovnik. No puritan, Foot was fond of drink and laughter as well as ancient historical ports. It was a fitting last hurrah.

* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Winston Churchill

This obit from the AP appeared today in the Chicago Tribune.

Winston Spencer Churchill


LONDON (AP) - Winston Spencer Churchill, a former member of Parliament and grandson of Britain's wartime leader, died Tuesday, an associate said. He was 69. Churchill had been suffering from cancer and died at his London home, said Cmdr. John Muxworthy, president of the United Kingdom National Defense Association.


Churchill was a member of the House of Commons from 1970 to 1997. Earlier he had been a foreign correspondent for The Times of London, The Daily Telegraph and other papers. He was a founder of the Defense Association, which campaigned for greater support for Britain's armed forces. "A true patriot, WSC followed in the steps of his grandfather, Sir Winston, who, in the 1930s campaigned ceaselessly for this country to rearm in the face of the ever-growing threat from Nazi Germany," Muxworthy said. "Eighty years on, our Winston has been fighting the same battle."


Churchill was born in October 1940 at Chequers, the prime mi nister's official country residence, shortly after Royal Air Force pilots prevailed in the Battle of Britain. During it, Hitler's Luftwaffe was prevented from destroying Britain's air defenses or forcing the country to negotiate an armistice. He was the son of Randolph Churchill and Pamela Digby, who scandalized London society with her affairs and who, in later life, as Pamela Harriman, became U.S. ambassador to France. The parents divorced in 1945.

Wife of Averell Harriman. A Washington DC socilate; as I recall, her home was a Democratic Party temple. President Clinton appointed her ambassador to France, as I recall. An interesting detail of her fascinating life was her being introduced to Adolf Hitler by Unity Midford, one of the noted Mitford sisters and a prominent supporter of fascism.

"I never knew my parents together, so their split meant nothing to me," Churchill said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2008. "But it did mean I got a great deal of grandparental sunlight." He recalled staying at Chartwell, his grandfather's home southeast of London, and finding the old man "wreathed in cigar smoke with a whisky and soda already on his table" in the morning. The drink, he added, was very weak. "Each afternoon, we'd spend a couple of hours together, laying bricks. If anyone had as ked me what my grandfather did, I'd have said: He's a bricklayer,'" Churchill recalled.

In his autobiography, "Memories and Adventures," Churchill said his famous name could be a burden, especially when he was in school at Eton. He told of bullies swearing at him, then saying: "And take this for being Winston-bloody-Churchill!"

Imagine having the old man as one's grandfather; what a burden for a youngster.

Young Winston's career in journalism began with an unpaid job as a copyreader at The Wall Street Journal. Following his graduation from Oxford University, he covered conflicts in Yemen, the Congo, Angola, Vietnam and Biafra. He also recalled being attacked by Chicago police officers at the raucous Democratic Party convention in 1968.

His grandfather had also been a journalist.


He was elected as a Conservative to represent Stretford in Lancashire in 1970, serving that district until 1983. During that period he effectively killed his chances for advancement by defying Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and voting against sanctions against white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Churchill subsequently represented Manchester Davyhulme from 1983 until 1997.


In 1979, he was embroiled in scandal over his two-year affair with Soraya Khashoggi, the former wife of a Saudi arms dealer. The affair came to light during a sensational prosecution of three police officers for blackmailing Khashoggi. A defense lawyer had claimed police were investigating Khashoggi because she was involved with a politician, subsequently identified as Churchill. He also drew criticism in 1995 after selling his grandfather's personal papers to the nation for 12.5 million pounds ($20 million).


"Although the trustees could have got significantly more on the world market, it was their and my specific wish that the papers should not be offered in the open market but should remain in this country," Churchill said at the time. Churchill is survived by two daughters and two sons from his marriage to Mary Caroline d'Erlanger, which ended in divorce in 1997; and by his second wife, Luce Danielson.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press

Of course, his obituary will appear in many places, certainly in English media. The Daily telegraph headlines it Former Tory MP Winston Churchill dies; the Independent: former MP, and a related article: Winston Churchill's grandson took fight to the backbenches; the Ukranian Globalist: Winston Churchill the Junior is dead;and so on.

Colourful and successful career in the wartime RAF

Jack Brotherton-Ratcliffe, who has died aged 90, co-founded the Croudace group of companies, one of the biggest and most successful privately-owned construction companies in Britain.

The thumbnail picture is accompanied by this summary: Innovative building tycoon who prospered in the 1980s property boom but insisted on an ethical approach. Implied is that ethics is not necessary for prospering, and that ethics do not preclude prospering.


Published: 5:56PM GMT 28 Feb 2010 - London Telegraph

He enjoyed a colourful and successful career in the wartime RAF, piloting Liberators and Halifaxes on more than 90 operations during 1943 and 1944, and ending the war as a squadron-leader. For his exploits he was awarded the DSO.


John Brotherton-Ratcliffe, known as Jack, was born on November 18 1919, the fifth of a family of seven. His early years were spent in Ealing and later Kenley, with a year in Belgium when he was six to ensure he could speak his French mother's language.


At Harrow, Ratcliffe had mixed success, excelling in gymnastics and electro-mechanics. He was in the Officer Training Corps and had a keen interest in flying, building a kit aircraft, the "Flying Flea", which had a very dubious safety record. Fortunately, before he and his brothers could test it, their father confiscated the propeller.


In 1938 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford to read Physics and learned to fly with the University Air Squadron. At the outbreak of war he joined the RAF and completed his training at Cranwell before becoming a flying instructor. In July 1941 he left for South Africa where he trained pilots at an air school in the Transvaal. After two years he moved to the Middle East and converted to the Liberator heavy bomber.


Ratcliffe joined No 148 Squadron at Gambut in Libya in April 1943. The squadron had a special duties role, its main task being to drop arms and agents into the Balkans where partisans were operating. When not engaged on these missions Ratcliffe carried out bombing raids on targets in Italy and southern Europe. On October 21 1943 he unexpectedly found himself detailed to fly a Dakota to a remote landing strip in Greece where he was to pick up 26 people before flying back to Gambut. He had never flown the aircraft type before and, after two brief familiarisation sorties, he completed the operation successfully.


Ratcliffe had completed almost 70 operations when No 148 replaced its Liberators with the Halifax, flying from an airfield in southern Italy. Returning from an abortive supply-dropping operation over Yugoslavia, severe weather and a shortage of fuel forced the crew to bale out and they were rescued from the Gulf of Taranto.

Bale out?

Six weeks later, on January 10 1944, Ratcliffe and his crew were detailed to make two drops to partisans in Albania and Greece. On the outward journey one of the four engines failed but the crew pressed on. After making the first drop, Ratcliffe flew on to the second dropping zone in a valley. Another engine failed and the aircraft was unable to climb away so he ordered his crew to bale out. Ratcliffe remained at the controls until the last man had left, by which time the aircraft was too low for him to parachute to safety and he was forced to make a crash landing in a maize field. The crew managed to join up and make contact with Greek partisans and their British liaison officer who took them back to his base in the mountains. After spending a few weeks in hiding, Ratcliffe and his crew were picked up by the Royal Navy and taken to Italy. He was awarded the DSO for "his skill, courage and devotion to duty".

In July 1944, Ratcliffe left No148 and served with a mobile operations wing in Italy. He was released from the RAF as a squadron leader in December 1945. He trained on Liberators and Halifaxes and in 1943 moved to Libya from where he flew supplies to rebel groups across the Balkans, and also undertook bombing missions.

After the war, not wanting to resume his undergraduate career, Ratcliffe joined his next door neighbour, Oliver Croudace, in his fledgling construction company. At once Ratcliffe saw the opportunities both for renovation and for new council and private housing in the South East, by then scarred by bomb damage and years of neglect, and where a strong political drive for more houses meant that planning restrictions were few.

Ratcliffe bought out his partner and began rapidly to expand Croudace's business, gearing it up for the acquisition of sites for private housing. In 1946 the groundbreaking New Towns Act had heralded the incoming Labour government's political dynamic for town and country development, and the subsequent Conservative governments of the 1950s continued housing policies which among other things facilitated the release of land for building.


During these years Ratcliffe rode the crest of a wave, achieving large-scale success with contracts for developments in Surrey and, especially, in the development of Crawley New Town. An innovator in his style of management, Ratcliffe pioneered the introduction of time and motion studies on building sites, supported by centralised formal control systems. These far-sighted methods enabled him to collect and accurately evaluate data for forecasting project profitability, and so radically to increase Croudace's business during a series of building booms in both the private and local authority sectors. Ratcliffe continued to respond to new commercial challenges, and with his 1974 acquisition of Maybrook, an ailing property investment company, he added a new arm to Croudace's operations, enabling it to continue to prosper through the property sector's golden years in the 1980s.


Despite the inevitable periods of economic recession, which saw so many of his competitors fail, Ratcliffe's firm control and lucid appreciation of his market enabled him to sustain his company's success. In all his business dealings Ratcliffe insisted on an ethical approach, in part a consequence of his admiration for his great-uncle, the last Lord Brotherton, a philanthropist and successful industrialist in his native Yorkshire. A humanist and dedicated family man, Ratcliffe was generous both with his wealth and with his time, while eschewing any desire for public recognition.


Jack Brotherton-Ratcliffe, who died on Christmas Eve, married, in 1945, Rona Greengrass. She predeceased him in 1995. Their two sons and two daughters survive him.

Language Expert Who Edited Dictionaries

Came across this name in the Q&A with Bruce Weber.

As the managing editor of the first edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language — a 9 1/4-pound, 2,091-page volume defining more than 260,0000 terms, which appeared in 1966 and was the first dictionary to be organized with the aid of a computer — Mr. Urdang presided over a seven-year research and compilation project that, at a cost of $3 million, was, at the time, the largest undertaking in the history of Random House, a company founded in 1925. But it was merely a foundation for a career that, in so many words, encompassed so many words.

Mr. Urdang’s view of language was that of an enjoyer, someone who delighted in its flexibility and invention, rather than that of a guardian always on alert against violations of precedent. In 1974 he was the founding editor of Verbatim, a respected quarterly newsletter on language that melded academic treatments of linguistic topics (“Southern Amerind Lexical Contributions”) and more amused and amusing stories with titles like “Ooglification in American English Slang” and “Prep School Slanguage.”

That quarterly now has an eponymous blog.

In 1969 he started Laurence Urdang Inc., a company with offices in Connecticut and Aylesbury, England. It published not only Verbatim but also some 150 books, his own and others’, on words and language. In 1972 he compiled The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words. It was a book that was not supposed to be a comprehensive work, just an enjoyable one for word enthusiasts. Or as Mr. Urdang put it himself in the introduction:
“This is not a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of nullifidians. Rather it is hoped that the haecceity of this enchiridion of arcane and recondite sesquipedalian items will appeal to the oniomania of an eximious Gemeinschaft whose legerity and sophrosyne, whose Sprachgefühl and orexis will find more than fugacious fulfillment among its felicific pages.”

Vera Atkins, Spymaster

 The confessions she obtained from the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, were used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. She always shuddered at Höss's reaction to her suggestion that 1.5 million people had been killed in Auschwitz. "Oh no," he said, as if offended. "It was 2,345,000."

One agent, George Millar, recalled in his autobiography, "Road to Resistance,"( Little, Brown, 1980), how she had reacted to his falling in love -- again. "Oh, the bloody English!" she said. "We never have bother of this sort with the French. They just copulate, and that is that."

Vera Atkins, 92, Spymaster for British, Dies - June 27, 2000

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Vera Atkins, who recruited, trained and watched over the legendary British secret agents who parachuted into France to sabotage the Nazis in World War II, died on Saturday in Hastings, Sussex. She was 92.

Vera AtkinsAlthough Ian Fleming never identified her, Ms. Atkins was widely believed to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond series. She was principal assistant to Col. Maurice Buckmaster, director of the Special Operations Executive, who is said to have been the model for "M."

But Ms. Atkins's steel-trap intelligence and fierce loyalty to agents who had been warned their chances of surviving were barely one in two were a far cry from Miss Moneypenny's lovestruck mooning over the elusive Bond. Ms. Atkins's heart was with her 400 secret agents. She stood on the runway to watch each take off to parachute into France.

After the war, when the tally of lost agents turned out to be a little worse than 1 in 4, Ms. Atkins pushed to be assigned to investigate each of the 118 cases. She traced 117, all dead, and brought their surviving killers to war crimes trials. The 118th had been, unknown to her, a compulsive gambler who vanished not far from Monte Carlo while carrying three million francs of secret service money.

"I could not just abandon their memory," she said. "I decided we must find out what happened to each one, and where."

She spent nearly a year questioning officers from concentration camps and poring over records. "I was probably the only person who could do this," she said. "You had to know every detail of the agents, names, code names, every hair on their heads, to spot their tracks."

The confessions she obtained from the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, were used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. She always shuddered at Höss's reaction to her suggestion that 1.5 million people had been killed in Auschwitz.

"Oh no," he said, as if offended. "It was 2,345,000."

Ms. Atkins was born Vera Maria Rosenberg in Bucharest, Romania, and went to London with her parents in 1933, where she adopted her mother's last name. She studied modern languages at the Sorbonne and went to finishing school at Lausanne. Her perfect French and her just as perfect manners would come in handy later.

At the outbreak of the war, she joined the Special Operations Executive, which Winston Churchill set up "to set Europe ablaze" through sabotage and subversion. The unit started slowly. But after victory in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "It was the equivalent of 15 divisions."

Hitler said, "When I get to London I am not sure who I shall hang first -- Churchill or that man Buckmaster."

Hitler, perhaps, did not know about Buckmaster's assistant, Ms. Atkins.

The spymasters headed the unit's F section, for France. They began by interviewing candidates in a hotel room with a desk, two chairs and a lightbulb. After the initial questioning, they had a general conversation in French to see whether the applicant could pass as a native. Each successful candidate was told that he had a 50-50 chance of survival and given a few days to think about it.

The recruits were a remarkable cross-section -- bankers and playwrights, chefs and taxicab drivers. Gen. Charles de Gaulle had insisted that the unit not recruit French citizens, while demanding that he control the agents. Most of those selected were half-French British citizens.

The initial training was at a 16th-century country house where they had no contact with the outside world. Next came a commando course in the Scottish Highlands, where they learned about guns and explosives. Then there was a survival course in Hampshire, followed by parachute training near Manchester.

They were given practice in being interrogated and keeping up their cover stories by going over and over their false identities and backgrounds.

It was Ms. Atkins who briefed the agents in minute detail on how to live in occupied France with its curfew and regulations. They were given continental clothing and French mementos, ticket stubs, letters and keepsakes to put in their pockets.

At last, they were dropped in France, to be met by reception committees. Each evening, they received their orders in coded personal messages broadcast after the news on the BBC French Service.

Ms. Atkins had no rank, but the blunt force of her personality, described by The Times of London as a "sledgehammer," pervaded the operation. She worked 18-hour days. A British television documentary in 1997 reported that she sent off each agent with the brisk shout of a French expletive.

One agent, George Millar, recalled in his autobiography, "Road to Resistance,"( Little, Brown, 1980), how she had reacted to his falling in love -- again. "Oh, the bloody English!" she said. "We never have bother of this sort with the French. They just copulate, and that is that."

Usually she remained in the shadows. But the accounts of some heroes whom she controlled eventually came to the fore. Four agents were captured separately, given fatal injections and burned in ovens. Violette Szabo, who was tortured and shot, became famous. So did Odette Sansom, who refused to talk even when the Gestapo pulled out her toenails one by one. She was the first woman awarded the George Cross and was the subject of a 1951 movie that took its title from her first name.

Ms. Atkins, who did not marry and has no known survivors, worked to keep the memory of the Resistance alive. She was appointed a Commandant of the Legion of Honor in 1987.

She traveled a great deal, but settled in a cottage left her by an aunt at Winchelsea, from which, on a clear day, you can see France.