This was not how things stood 70 years ago. In 1939, Rothkowitz ? the change of name did not come until 1940 ? was struggling to find a painterly voice, playing around with surrealism and reading Freud and Jung. It was Bloom, a decade younger and in Boston rather than New York, who was making the work that would lead the eminent critic Clement Greenberg to dub him "the greatest artist in America" the following year. It was Bloom who was given an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942 and ( Read more... )
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"I thought, what a nondescript person," she recalled in later life. "You would never have picked him out in a crowd. No, I'm afraid no aura of evil, no sense of foreboding, a rather quiet voice. In fact, little stands out other than the memory of his most extraordinary blue eyes."

Her father, Lord Londonderry, spent years in vain attempts to reason with Hitler and other Nazis. At one point he brought to Mount Stewart, his grand home near Belfast, senior Hitler official Von Ribbentrop, who ( Read more... )
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Charlie Wayman was an ebullient, bouncily inventive, prodigiously prolific centre-forward, a pint-sized predator who topped the scoring charts for a succession of major football clubs in the decade immediately after the Second World War. Many knowledgeable observers deemed the affable north-easterner a world-class finisher, and it was an outrage to them that he didn't win a single England cap.

The most obvious explanation for the omission was that Wayman was in competition for his country's ( Read more... )
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Educated at Eton, and after doing National Service with the Welsh Guards, Glazebrook read history at Cambridge, and then continued to the Slade School of Art, breaking off briefly to visit Vienna where he studied painting under Oskar Kok-oschka. And although he continued producing charming watercolours throughout his life ? he was often to be found painting in the churchyard at St Luke's churchyard in Chelsea ? he was known best for his role in all aspects of the art world, his great breadth of ( Read more... )
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He created the Russian Research Foundation and its Soviet Labour Review. He was a researcher and adviser to Anglo-American think-tanks, including the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. Later he worked with Anatoly Chubais, the Russian privatisation minister, while Yeltsin's reformers briefly held sway.

For Miller the demise of Soviet Communism was an absolute certainty, provided that the West remained strong. His vision was tempered with patience ( Read more... )
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The two artists were born on the same day, 13 June 1935: Jeanne-Claude in Casablanca, Morocco and Christo in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Christo fled the repressive regime of his native country for Paris in 1956, and worked as a jobbing artist. It was there, two years later, that the couple met, while Christo was painting portraits of Précilda de Guillebon, Jeanne-Claude's mother. Although Jeanne-Claude married Philippe Planchon in 1959, she left him shortly afterwards, already pregnant at the time with ( Read more... )
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Assiduous readers of Independent obituaries should by now be familiar with the 1954 Italian expedition to K2 and its colourful cast. This is the third time in eight years that we have followed Ardito Desio's caravan, with its 500 porters, up the Baltoro glacier into the heart of Karakoram mountains of Pakistan. And over that period the storia K2 has been rewritten.

Desio, the geology professor who led the expedition, died in 2001 at the age of 104, having had the unusual distinction of living ( Read more... )
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Teddy Darvas was born in 1925 in Cluj, in what was then Transylvania. The family moved to Budapest and Teddy went to an English prep school in the city. His father, Simon Darvas, had been at school with Alexander Korda. They were such close friends that he took Korda to his first movie ? at a coffee shop where the owner projected on to a white sheet. When the BBC made a documentary about the Kordas, the director asked Teddy's father to tell the story and he refused, saying: "Who wants to see an ( Read more... )
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If there were eccentricities about Ted Jackson (and he would not have recognised them as such), all who knew him respected his sharp mind and intellectual range. Educated at Charterhouse; Peterhouse College, Cambridge; and London University, he served in the Far East during the Second World War before being called to the Bar in 1951. Much of his professional life was spent in the Office of the Solicitor of the Inland Revenue before he became a law reporter for the Incorporated Council of Law Reports ( Read more... )
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Not only did he help put London on the map as a serious film festival venue but he was the man who, according to his peers, brought world cinema to Britain by setting his sights away from the UK or Hollywood and screening movies from around the globe. Thus did the influx of foreign films to UK cinemas begin, a tradition of which Britain has remained in the vanguard in large part due to Wlaschin's vision.

Of course there were the French films, the Scandinavian and the sexually ( Read more... )
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Charnley was Blackpool's leading marksman in senior competition for nine consecutive seasons between 1958-59 and 1966-67. Every one of those campaigns was in the top flight and in several of them it was his goals which effectively preserved their place among the élite.

His tally is exceeded only by Jimmy Hampson's between the wars, when often the club was in the second tier where goals were easier to plunder, and, narrowly, by Stan Mortensen's in the decade after the ( Read more... )
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Alan Brien was a pivotal member of this all-star team that included Bernard Levin, Henry Fairlie and Katharine Whitehorn. He served as the drama critic, but wrote on many other topics with a combination of wit, intelligence, directness, social concern and a keen sense of the ridiculous. Although the magazine was owned by Ian Gilmour, a Conservative MP, it was then more radical in outlook than its stodgy left-wing rival, the New Statesman. Whatever the politics of the paper he was writing for, ( Read more... )
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Harman radicalised while still at school, and was an active socialist even before he went to Leeds University in 1962. By the time he arrived to do a PhD at the LSE in 1965 he was already a force on the left and writing for International Socialism. At the LSE he played a key role in the Socialist Society which, in turn, led the LSE sit-ins that helped trigger the whole British student movement of that time.

His commitment to political activity never weakened. Over the years he could be ( Read more... )
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It began as the single "Armchair Theatre" play A Magnum for Schneider (1967), with David Callan given the mission of sniffing out a gun-runner to redeem himself after challenging his bosses' authority once too often.

This led to four series of Callan (1967-72), which also featured as Callan's fellow-agents Peter Bowles, then Anthony Valentine, as Meres and ? from the third run ? Patrick Mower as Cross. Most memorable, though, was Russell Hunter in the role of the the petty thief Lonely, ( Read more... )
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In 2005, the controversial Slovenian alpinist was plucked from an icy cave at an altitude of more than 6,000 metres on the massive the Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat in Kashmir.

Thousands followed Humar's nine-day ordeal on the Rupal Face as it was relayed over the internet from base camp by his support team; Slovenians, by sentiment a nation of mountaineers, were transfixed by the drama. Humar survived thanks to an extraordinary act of daring by two Pakistani pilots pushing ( Read more... )
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Richard Michael Power Carver, army officer: born Bletchingley, Surrey 24 April 1915; MC 1941; DSO 1943 and Bar 1943; CBE 1945; Deputy Chief of Air Staff, East Africa 1954, Chief of Staff 1955; CB 1957, KCB 1966, GCB 1970; Director of Plans, War Office 1958-59; Commander, 6th Infantry Brigade 1960-62; General Officer Commanding, 3rd Division 1962-64; Director, Army Staff Duties, Ministry of Defence 1964-66; Commander, Far East Land Forces 1966-67; Commander-in-Chief, Far East 1967-69; ( Read more... )
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Clarence Carson Parks, songwriter: born Philadelphia 26 April 1936; twice married; died St Marys, Georgia 22 June 2005.

The songwriter and music publisher C. Carson Parks is best known for his song "Somethin' Stupid", which topped both the US and UK charts for Frank Sinatra and his daughter Nancy. Sinatra was to record another of Parks's compositions, "Open for Business as Usual" but, when he cancelled the session, Parks passed the song to Jack Jones. "Somethin' Stupid" ( Read more... )
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W.G. Beasley, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Far East at the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University, was a pioneer in introducing Japanese history in British universities and in communicating knowledge of Japan to a wider audience.

After completing his first degree at University College London, Beasley intended conducting research in Dutch history. However, he served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, in the course of which he studied the Japanese ( Read more... )
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The tragedy took place in Neustadt-Eilvese at a railway crossing about 25km from his hometown of Hannover. The two train drivers reported seeing a man on the tracks and applied the brakes while travelling at about 100mph but could not stop in time. Enke died at the scene. He was 32.

On the surface it appeared that Enke's career was, once more, in the ascendant after some turbulent times, but his wife, Teresa, said he had struggled with depression for years. She explained how she endeavoured ( Read more... )
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