Eric Newby, CBE, MC, writer, was born on December 6, 1919. He died on October 20, aged 86

A writer whose accounts of exploration and tales of far away lands epitomised adventure before tourism, Eric Newby was an author whose preferred mode of travel was overland, ideally on a bike with his wife. In a world shrinking under the pressure of adventure tourism, no one perhaps was able so to capture the delight of finding oneself for the first time in the untenanted wild places of the Earth. His works included The Last Grain Race (1956), A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) and Around the World in Eighty Years (2000). He was also travel editor of The Observer.

P. W. Botha, first State President of South Africa, 1984-89, was born on January 12, 1916. He died on October 31, aged 90

P. W. Botha, the Groot Krokodil (Great Crocodile) of Afrikaner politics, was a contradictory figure. Although he admitted that the apartheid state “must adapt or die” and introduced constitutional reforms that brought Coloured and Asian representation into Parliament and the Cabinet, he also ignored the demands of Africans and supervised the brutal crackdown on violent anti-apartheid unrest. He famously wagged his finger in 1985 during his “crossing the Rubicon” speech, declaring: “Don’t push us too far.”

William Styron, novelist, was born on June 11, 1925. He died on November 1, aged 81

Of all the many American Southern writers who emerged around and after the Second World War, William Styron eventually had the most popular success. After serious critical consideration and much discussion of his first three books, there was ultimately a sharp division of opinion over The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), though it won a Pulitzer prize.

Markus Wolf, spymaster, was born on January 19, 1923. He died on November 9, aged 83

Markus Wolf was modern history’s most brilliant spymaster, and, because his working life was devoted to the cause of communist oppression, also its most dangerous. For 34 years he led the East German secret intelligence service, Wolf was both callous and brilliant, and harvested Bonn’s and Nato’s innermost secrets with impunity for decades. No one touched by his secret service was ever to be forgotten by it; no debt was incurred for which he would not one day exact repayment.

Jack Palance, actor, was born on February 18, 1919. He died on November 10, aged 87

Known for his performances in the Sudden Fear (1952) and Shane (1953), Jack Palance was a gaunt, skull-faced actor who played hard men in a string of westerns. He set an Oscar record for the longest gap between first nomination and first win when he finally collected the award for best supporting actor for the comedy City Slickers in 1992, in which he had some fun with his screen persona as a wheezy, tough, old cowboy.

Milton Friedman, economist, was born on July 31, 1912. He died on November 16, aged 94

Known at his pinnacle as “Mrs Thatcher’s favourite economist” and hailed widely as the instigator of monetarist economics, Milton Friedman was a pivotal intellectual inspiration for the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions. Friedman did not invent monetarism, but he did combine academic pre-eminence and popular showmanship to propel it to the forefront of politics, and for a while he had supplanted Keynes as the world’s most influential economist.

Ferenc Puskás, footballer, was born on April 2, 1927. He died on November 17, aged 79

Ferenc Puskás was an unlikely footballing hero. He was a diminutive, solid, chubby-cheeked man not blessed with the greatest of pace, yet his small stocky frame belied his skill on the ball. Puskas was Hungary’s most famous footballer, as the captain and inside left of the dazzling “Magical Magyars” team of the 1950s — a side widely regarded as the greatest side never to win the World Cup. He later played for Real Madrid, where he established a devastating partnership with Alfredo Di Stefano.

Robert Altman, film director, was born on February 20, 1925. He died on November 20, aged 81

Robert Altman had an enormous commercial and critical success with the anti-war comedy M*A*S*H (1969), and then turned his back on the mass audience with a series of quirky and highly personal films that often owed more to the tradition of the European art cinema than of Hollywood. Ceaselessly experimental, Altman introduced a strong element of improvisation in his work, encouraging his actors to create their characters from a bare outline and even to write their own dialogue.

Alan Freeman, MBE, disc jockey, was born on July 6, 1927. He died on November 27, aged 79

Over a period of several decades, the disc jockey Alan Freeman was one of the most familiar voices on radio in the UK, his never-changing manner and somewhat cheesy delivery earning him enormous popularity. With his relentless cheerfulness and rapid-delivery patter — exemplified by his catchphrases “Greetings, pop pickers”, “All right?” and “Not ‘arf” — Freeman was an instantly recognisable presence on the airwaves.

Allen Carr, self-help author, was born on September 2, 1934. He died on November 29, aged 72

“Do you have a feeling of doom and gloom? Forget it. I’ve achieved some marvellous things in my life. By far the greatest was to escape from the slavery of nicotine addiction.” Allen Carr’s introduction to the third edition of his bestselling Easy Way to Stop Smoking could double as his epitaph. While his impending death from lung cancer was seen by many as a cruel irony, and by others as a signal for sainthood, Carr remained faithful to his emphasis on positive thinking.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, US diplomat, was born on November 19, 1926. She died on December 7, aged 80

By far Britain’s least favourite American during the Falklands conflict was the US Ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Only hours after the 1982 invasion of the islands she attended as a guest of honour a reception at the Argentine Embassy in Washington. But her efforts to tilt the Reagan Administration in favour of Argentina and against Britain proved unsuccessful. A formidable figure at the UN, she criticised what she saw as the double standards of Third World countries.

General Augusto Pinochet, Chilean dictator, 1973-90, was born on November 25, 1915. He died on December 10, aged 91

General Pinochet seized power in September 1973, in a military coup against the Chilean Government of President Salvador Allende. Pinochet became an international symbol of Latin American military dictatorship, though for many Chileans he was the man who saved Chile from a Marxist takeover, and presided over a restructuring that set the country on the road to sustained economic growth. His regime, however, also oversaw the death and disappearance of nearly 3,000 men and women, and many thousands more were tortured, imprisoned or exiled.

Frank Johnson, journalist, was born on January 20, 1943. He died on December 15, aged 63

It was a very English art form that Frank Johnson practised. He was one of a handful of parliamentary sketchwriters who helped to bring about a minor journalistic revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Until then such commentators were more to be found on the political Left than Right. He made right-wing satire fashionable — and fun for the conservative reader.

Joseph Barbera, animator, was born on March 24, 1911. He died on December 18, aged 95

At MGM in the 1940s Joseph Barbera and William Hanna created a cartoon-character partnership that was to prove as durable as their own — a cat and mouse caught up in a never-ending cycle of surreal mayhem. Tom and Jerry delighted audiences, while prompting concerns about the violence. The two animators rose to new heights with their company Hanna-Barbera Productions, which came to dominate the developing TV cartoons market. Their creations included Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo and The Flintstones, “a modern, Stone Age family”.







Saparmurat Niyazov, President of Turkmenistan, was born on February 19, 1940. He died on December 21, aged 66

Saparmurat Niyazov was a vainglorious and ruthless leader of Turkmenistan who impoverished his nation and sowed the seeds of ethnic conflict. He stifled his country’s cultural and political life, and squandered the vast wealth from its mineral resources on tyrannical eccentricities, such as ordering the construction of a “Golden Age Lake” in the desert at a projected cost of $6.5 billion.







Charlie Drake, comedian and actor, was born on June 19, 1925. He died on December 24, aged 81

Charlie Drake was arguably the best slapstick comedian since Charlie Chaplin. He was entrenched in that venerable English comic tradition of the loveable underdog who always had the last laugh. Blessed with a permanently boyish face framed by ginger curls, and a miniature body, His catchphrase, “Hello, my darlings”, delivered in that trademark mock-falsetto tone, could reduce an audience to tears.





James Brown, soul singer, was born on May 3, 1928. He died on Christmas Day, 2006, aged 78

A singer, dancer and showman supreme, James Brown was long acknowledged as the main influence on a subsequent generation of superstar hoofers. In a career spanning five decades, he redefined the nature of soul in the 1950s, invented funk in the 1960s, partly inspired the disco revolution of the 1970s and, thanks to the technological miracle of sampling, involuntarily contributed excerpts of his work to several thousand rap recordings of the 1980s and 1990s.





Gerald Ford, President of the United States, August 1974-77, was born on July 14, 1913. He died on December 26, aged 93

The only man ever to occupy the offices of vice-president and president of the US without being elected to either office, Gerald Ford played an indispensable role guiding the country’s political life back to solid ground when the Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, and the President, Richard Nixon, had been forced from office after being exposed as having broken the law of the land. It was Ford’s task to confront the fallout from the American defeat in Vietnam and then, of President Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate break-in. After Nixon’s resignation he provided the US with an image of honesty and reliability.





Lord Hussey of North Bradley, chairman of the BBC, 1986-96, was born on August 29, 1923. He died on December 27, aged 83

Marmaduke Hussey’s career in newspapers culminated in his years as chief executive of Times Newspapers Ltd (TNL) from 1971 to 1982. As such it fell to him to implement the suspension of publication of the company’s titles, a strategy designed to bring the print trade unions to heel, which ended in defeat for TNL’s management. His subsequent chairmanship of the BBC was notable for a strict eye on costs. He also made it less paternalistic and more open to its commercial possibilities.

Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd founder and songwriter, was born on January 6, 1946. He died on July 7, aged 60



In the early days of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett was the group’s undisputed leader. His psychedelic and often whimsical style of songwriting perfectly encapsulated the heady spirit of the late 1960s and the hippy dream. Barrett’s compositional method has been called naive, but it is perhaps better described as childlike, often effortlessly inhabiting the worlds of dream, mystery and the subconscious. His intake of drugs took its toll, however, and after a mental breakdown he left the group in 1968 and spent the rest of his life as a recluse.







Mickey Spillane, writer, was born on March 9, 1918. He died on July 17, aged 88

Mickey Spillane was both the most popular and the most vilified American crime writer of the postwar period. If the luridly described violence and sex which drew so many readers but repelled the critics and his fellow authors appear less exceptional now, this is partly because he had an influence on the craft, helping to transform the genre into what it has become. Although refreshingly unpretentious whenever he talked about his work, he remained in person a somewhat enigmatic figure with a curiously sporadic career.







Ta Mok, Khmer Rouge military leader, was born in 1926. He died on July 21. He was believed to be 80

By general consent the most cruel and wantonly violent of the Khmer Rouge leaders who transformed the Cambodian countryside into the infamous killing fields in the terrible era of Pol Pot’s regime in the 1970s, Ta Mok was for three years in charge of the southwest of the country, which became notorious for its executions, torture and slave labour, even by the black standards of the Khmer Rouge.







Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, DBE, soprano, was born on December 9, 1915. She died on August 3, aged 90

The German-born soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s partnership with her record producer husband, Walter Legge, created an indelible impression on the world stage. “Radiant” was an adjective applied frequently to Schwarzkopf by critics and others, and it was used with justification. The word well described the famed and inimitable Schwarzkopf interpretations of certain heroines in Strauss operas, such as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier and the Countess in Capriccio. It was altogether appropriate to her performance in lieder, with Wolf and Strauss (again) to the fore, to which she turned when she gave up the stage.







General Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay, 1954-89, was born on November 3, 1912. He died on August 16, aged 93

Alfredo Stroessner was one of Latin America’s longest- serving dictators, ruling Paraguay for 35 years, until he was deposed by a military coup in February 1989. Tough, authoritarian, quick-thinking, wily and ruthless, Stroessner kept his land-locked country in a state of servile backwardness for more than three decades.







Sir Alfred Sherman, co-founder of the Centre for Policy Studies, was born on November 10, 1919. He died on August 26, aged 86

Enfant terrible and éminence grise of the Conservative Party in the mid and late 1970s, Alfred Sherman, a journalist, policy thinker and undeniable iconoclast, was a leading influence on Margaret Thatcher. A former communist who had fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, Sherman underwent a spectacular ideological conversion from the far Left to the extreme Right. Thus transformed, his zeal and determination proved decisive in moving the Tories towards policies that would have seemed impossibly right-wing in the immediate postwar period.







Sir Clyde Walcott, cricketer, was born on January 17, 1926. He died on August 26, aged 80

Clyde Walcott was an outstanding West Indies batsman whose name will always be linked with his contemporaries, Frank Worrell and Everton Weekes. The three Barbadians became known as “the Three Ws” on account of their influence on the development of West Indies in the Test arena. The most powerful batsman of the trio, Walcott held his hands low on the bat handle, and unwound from a crouched stance to drive, square-cut and hook with great certainty. From the outset of the 1950s their prolific scoring put West Indies in the forefront of world cricket for the first time.







Glenn Ford, actor, was born on May 1, 1916. He died on August 30, aged 90

In a career which lasted nearly six decades and spanned the golden era of Hollywood, Glenn Ford appeared in more than 100 films, notably Gilda (1946), opposite Rita Hayworth, The Big Heat (1953) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961), for which he won a Golden Globe Best Actor award. A specialist in quietly intense character roles, Ford also appeared in a clutch of memorable westerns. He was a genially restrained character actor whose screen personality was invariably honest, reliable and sternly amiable.







Naguib Mahfouz, novelist, was born on December 11, 1911. He died on August 30, aged 94

The father of the contemporary Egyptian novel, Naguib Mahfouz remains to date the only Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was awarded to him in 1988. His influence was immense, not only on the literature of Egypt, but on Arab creative writing in general. His great strength was that he confined himself to themes that he knew best, and seldom strayed far from the streets of his beloved Cairo and their denizens.





Steve Irwin, naturalist, environmentalist and TV presenter, was born on February 22, 1962. He died on September 4, aged 44

Steve Irwin was an Australian naturalist known through his documentaries on the cable TV channel Animal Planet to some 500 million people in more than 120 countries. As the exuberant, golden-haired, khaki-wearing and apparently fearless Crocodile Hunter, he got close to — and even wrestled — numerous predators. His unscripted narration was punctuated with “Crikey!” and “Look at this beauty!” Many called him a thrill seeker, but he called himself a wildlife warrior.







Sir John Drummond, CBE, writer, broadcaster and impresario, was born on November 25, 1934. He died on September 6, aged 71

Through the mediums of television and radio, Sir John Drummond was a passionate and uncompromising champion of the arts, who successfully ran the Edinburgh Festival, Radio 3 and the Proms. The 18 years that Drummond spent in the BBC heralded an unprecedented burgeoning of arts programmes on BBC Television. To everything he did he brought a highly personal stamp, which derived as much from his conviction that none of the arts should be self- contained as from his passionate concern with quality.





Raymond Baxter, OBE, broadcaster, was born on January 25, 1922. He died on September 15, aged 84

Raymond Baxter’s polished voice was one of the most distinctive in postwar broadcasting, belonging to a capable all-rounder whose passions were cars and aeroplanes, the latter as befitted a man who had had a distinguished wartime career as a fighter pilot. But he was equally at home covering state occasions and fronting the BBC Television’s popular science programme, Tomorrow’s World.







Oriana Fallaci, journalist and author, was born on July 29, 1929. She died on September 15, aged 77

Oriana Fallaci was a journalist of brutal honesty whose interviews with the world’s leading personalities left few unscathed. She was a journalist of passion, subjectivity and brutal honesty. It was as much her fiery and unforgiving personality that made her Italy’s best-known exponent of her trade as her record of revealing interviews with the likes of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Henry Kissinger.







Sir Malcolm Arnold, composer, was born on October 21, 1921. He died on September 23, aged 84

An extremely fluent composer, known for his melodious, often jokey and lightweight works, Malcolm Arnold realised the importance of tunes and melodies long before they came back into fashion. When he was at his peak during his thirties his output was as huge as it was varied. Between 1951 and 1957 he wrote the scores for more than 80 films, culminating in the famous whistling adaptation of the Colonel Bogey march in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which won him an Academy Award.







Lord Harris of High Cross, general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, 1957-87, was born on December 10, 1924. He died on October 19, aged 81

For three decades at the epicentre of free-market thinking, Ralph Harris was decisive in converting the British political consensus back to liberal economics. He did this chiefly by informing — and often inspiring — an ideological underpinning for Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph as they remodelled the Conservative Party after 1975. At the root of his thinking lay an abhorrence of the “vain ambition” of economic planning — 1940s controls really did entail, he recalled, that “the practical world was a kind of serfdom. You did as you were told.”

Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai and Vice-President of the United Arab Emirates, was born in 1943. He died on January 4, aged 62

Sheikh Maktoum both oversaw economic expansion in Dubai and homebuilding throughout the United Arab Emirates, and developed Dubai into the leading tourist destination in the Middle East. For the UAE he presided over a huge social programme of housebuilding, which over the years benefited thousands of the poorer families throughout the federation.







Tony Banks (Lord Stratford), MP for Newham North West and West Ham, 1983-2005, was born on April 8, 1943. He died on January 5, aged 62

Tony Banks, an East End Labour MP for 22 years, was almost a caricature of the chirpy, cheeky Cockney portrayed in British feelgood films of a bygone age. Even colleagues who felt the rough edge of his tongue mostly regarded him as a good thing, a valuable part of the rich tapestry of House of Commons life. Witty, disrespectful of authority and never at a loss for words, Banks was never a new Labour man. His interventions in the House would have been admired by members of the awkward squads in any Parliamentary Labour Party at any time during the 20th century.







Lord Merlyn-Rees, Northern Ireland Secretary, 1974-76 and Home Secretary, 1976-79, was born on December 18, 1920. He died on January 5, aged 85

Merylyn Rees was a Labour MP for nearly 30 years and a leading figure in his party for most of that time. Circumstances, however, denied him the lasting achievements that talent and character suggested might well have been his.

His party’s lack of office during what should have been his most productive years meant that he was in Cabinet only from 1974 to 1979. The first general election of 1974 also brought victory for extreme Protestants in Northern Ireland. This signalled an end to any idea of power-sharing, which was confirmed when Rees failed to take firm measures to end the loyalist strike in 1975.

His proposed title for his book on his experiences was No Solution and that really described the situation that he encountered.



Heinrich Harrer, mountaineer and explorer, was born on July 6, 1912. He died on January 7, aged 93

Heinrich Harrer was an Austrian mountaineer who escaped wartime detention to spend seven years in Tibet. His youthful idealism coincided with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, and he became by this historical accident a controversial figure, dogged into old age by his membership of the SS. Harrer later called his Nazi membership “an ideological error” and “a stupid mistake”.







Shelley Winters, actress, was born on August 18, 1920. She died on January 14, aged 85

For half a century Shelley Winters played victims, babes, shrews and matriarchs with sassy confidence. Although blonde and voluptuous in her early twenties, Winters was never really a conventional beauty and she rarely played the role of conventional leading lady. She was best known for her role in Alfie (1966), a film that celebrated the new sexual freedoms of the permissive society in London in the Swinging Sixties, in which as Ruby, a blowsy, middle-aged American tourist, she turns the tables on Michael Caine’s eponymous philanderer.

()







Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, ruler of Kuwait since 1977, was born in 1926. He died on January 15, aged 79

Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, 13th Emir of Kuwait, was a reluctant democrat who was pressed to share power by both his Western allies and fundamentalists at home. Praised for his efforts in rebuilding Kuwait after the Iraqi invaders were driven out in 1991, he was credited with creating his country’s infrastructure and gradually introducing democratic habits.







Wilson Pickett, soul singer, was born on March 18, 1941. He died on January 19, aged 64

Remembered for such hits as In the Midnight Hour, Land of 1,000 Dances and Mustang Sally, Wilson Pickett stood second only to Otis Redding among the great male soul singers of the 1960s. His vocal style was raw and earthy, and few worked up a greater sweat on stage or pumped up a crowd with more vigour. His greatest records were made in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and helped to define the style that would become known as “Southern soul”.



Zaki Badawi, community leader, teacher and theologian, was born on August 11, 1922. He died on January 24, aged 83

Few men have done as much to reconcile Islam with modernity as Zaki Badawi, the founder and principal of the Muslim College in London. And few men have played such a crucial role in attempting to find a harmonious balance between the beliefs, culture and values of Islam and secular British society. Indeed, that almost two million British Muslims are today able to define themselves as such owes much to the vision of this Egyptian-born scholar.







Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr and civil rights activist, was born on April 27, 1927. She died on January 31, aged 78

Coretta Scott King was the steadfast and determined widow of Martin Luther King Jr, in whose honour she founded the King Center in the basement of her Atlanta home soon after his assassination. The foundation aimed to advance Dr King’s legacy of non-violent social change. Scott King also led the campaign to have the third Monday of every January established as a public holiday in the US in remembrance of Martin Luther King’s birthday. The day was observed for the first time in 1986.





Moira Shearer, ballet dancer and actress, was born on January 17, 1926. She died on January 31, aged 80

Moira Shearer was a dazzling ballerina who moved beyond the confines of dance to take up directing, acting and authorship. It says something significant about Moira Shearer’s career that, having become at only 22 one of the most famous ballerinas in the world, she chose in later years to define her occupation in her Who’s Who entry simply as “writer”.







Betty Friedan, feminist and author, was born on February 4, 1921. She died on her 85th birthday

Betty Friedan has been called “the mother of American feminism”. Her contribution to the movement’s ideas and to its institutional structure was essential. Her book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), helped to launch the modern women’s movement, and she played a leading role in the foundation of the National Organisation for Women and other important feminist institutions.







Ron Greenwood, CBE, England football manager, 1977-82, was born on November 11, 1921. He died on February 9, aged 84

As England football manager from 1977 to 1982 Ron Greenwood was the first to take the national side through the qualifying rounds of a World Cup for almost 20 years. He also enjoyed success at club level with West Ham United, winning the FA Cup twice and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. A thoughtful man, Greenwood was not as instantly recognisable as other holders of the England post. But he brought to the team a wide knowledge of how the game was played around the world.







Sir Freddie Laker, founder of Laker Airways and Skytrain, was born on August 6, 1922. He died on February 9, aged 83

Freddie Laker was the entrepreneur whose Skytrain sparked an air fares revolution in 1977, but who was eventually brought down when national airlines undercut him. Laker set himself up as the champion of the “forgotten man”, whom he defined as working men with low incomes, and at the height of Skytrain’s operation he was carrying one in 17 transatlantic passengers and was the route’s fifth largest carrier.

Sir Peter Strawson, philosopher, was born on November 23, 1919. He died on February 13, aged 86

Peter Strawson was an Oxford philosopher of matchless range who made incisive, influential contributions to problems of language and metaphysics. His use of the notion of a presupposition encouraged empirical linguists to investigate more generally the way in which different sorts of utterance carry presuppositions.







Peter Osgood, footballer, was born on February 20, 1947. He died on March 1, aged 59

“Osgood is good” was the oft-uttered battle cry at Stamford Bridge in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the footballer Peter Osgood be-came the epitome of a Chelsea side renowned for its flair and flamboyancy. During this period with Osgood, the London side lifted the FA Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. Later with Southampton, Osgood would once again taste Cup glory. All three achievements owed greatly to his skill and prolific scoring.







John Profumo, CBE, Secretary of State for War, 1960-63, and chairman of Toynbee Hall, 1982-85, was born on January 30, 1915. He died on March 9, aged 91

His subsequent, wholly admirable, charity work notwithstanding, John Profumo will be remembered as the Secretary of State for War whose adulterous affair with the glamorous demi-mondaine Christine Keeler helped to hasten the resignation of the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963. The episode had an impact unique among sex and politics scandals in modern British life. Subsequent “minister and call-girl” stories had nothing like its impact, nor were they treated with such seriousness.







Slobodan Milosevic, former President of Yugoslavia, was born on August 20, 1941. He died on March 11, aged 64

Slobodan Milosevic will be remembered as the champion Communist apparatchik who jumped on a bandwagon of Serb nationalism, accelerating the disintegration of Tito’s Yugoslavia in a series of bloody ethnic conflicts that left hundreds of thousands dead across a territory he claimed he was trying to unify, as well as millions of grieving, displaced and impoverished families, the victims of his calamitous misrule.



Caspar Weinberger, US Secretary of Defence, 1981-87, was born on August 18, 1917. He died on March 28, aged 88

Caspar Weinberger was the US Secretary of Defence who built up the huge arsenal with which President Reagan confronted the military might of the Soviet Union in the last decade of its existence. He was not the only American who believed passionately that the price of safety in the modern world was to sink dollars into arming men and developing ever more complex weapons systems, but he was more intelligent, more sophisticated and genuinely tougher than most of America’s hawks.







Gene Pitney, singer and songwriter, was born on February 17, 1941. He died on April 5, aged 65

Known for such songs as 24 Hours from Tulsa and Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart, Gene Pitney was a versatile singer-songwriter who forged a durable career with his fusion of rock, remorse and romance. The crooning melodrama for which he is best remembered suggested a singer who took his art, and his pain, all too seriously. Yet it was Pitney’s stylistic range, versatility and likeable nature that enabled him to adapt, and so survive the 1960s.







Dame Muriel Spark, novelist, was born on February 1, 1918. She died on April 13, aged 88

Perhaps Scotland’s most important modern novelist, Muriel Spark was a small, striking woman, with a coruscating mind. She brought a vivacious imagination to her writing, backed by pitiless powers of observation. She wrote more than 20 novels — including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) — as well as stories, plays and children’s books. She was a master of taut, quirky plots, often focusing on a small group of people whose lives are altered by a strange twist of fate.







John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, was born on October 15, 1908. He died on April 29, aged 97

A magisterial liberal economist who eloquently castigated the complacency of the wealthy in The Affluent Society (1958) John Kenneth Galbraith was for more than half a century both Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a public intellectual, whose lucid writing expounded the Keynesian economics that he supported throughout his life. A product of New Deal America, he was John F. Kennedy’s Ambassador to India and adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson, but maintained that the great thrill of his life was debating with Friedrich von Hayek — and getting the better of him.







Floyd Patterson, world heavyweight boxing champion, 1956-59, and 1960-62, was born on January 4, 1935. He died on May 11, aged 71

A modest champion who punched above his weight and became the first heavyweight to regain his world title, Floyd Patterson was the first Olympic gold medallist to win a world heavyweight title. And he was the first man in the history of the ring to regain the world heavyweight title. On the debit side he was the first American since 1933 to lose the title to a European (Ingemar Johansson in 1959).







Eric Forth, Conservative MP for Bromley & Chislehurst, was born on September 9, 1944. He died May 17, aged 61

Eric Forth spent his parliamentary career in opposition to those in power, first as an irritant to his own side as a dissident member of government and then enthusiastically as a backbench guerrilla harrying new Labour. He had all the characteristics of a solid right-wing Tory. He had been briefly a schoolboy communist but then moved decidedly to the right. He was sympathe- tic to South Africa’s white minority rulers, in favour of capital punishment and implacably opposed to equal opportunities.







Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was born in 1966. He was killed on June 7, aged about 40

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the murderous leader of Islamist terrorists in Iraq who dreamt of surpassing, in brutal influence, even Osama bin Laden. From his beginning as a hyperactive, school bully and dim-witted brute in Jordan, to the height of his infamy as the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi knew little apart from violence.







Charles Haughey, Taoiseach, 1979-81, 1982, 1987-92, was born on September 16, 1925. He died on June 13, aged 80

Charles Haughey was a charismatic Irish politician whose substantial achievements as Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) came to be tainted by charges of shady dealings. To many he epitomised the new Irish capitalist class: dynamic, ruthless and brash. He served three separate terms as Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland between 1979 and 1992 and for almost 30 years he was arguably the central and certainly the most controversial and glamorous figure in Irish public life.







Lord Thomson of Fleet, businessman, was born on September 1, 1923. He died on June 12, aged 82

Ken Thomson took over his father Roy’s international media business upon his death in 1976, becoming the second Lord Thomson of Fleet. Almost at once he had to deal with the chronic labour troubles at The Times and The Sunday Times, which his father had acquired in the 1960s. The core problems, Thomson saw, were overmanning, restrictive practices and resistance to the introduction of computerised technology. In the autumn of 1978, frustrated by lack of progress in any of these areas, Thomson took the drastic step of suspending both titles in the hope of concentrating minds.







Aaron Spelling, TV producer, was born on April 22, 1923. He died on June 23, aged 83

The television producer Aaron Spelling was known for his glitzy soap operas that reflected the brittle escapism of the Reagan era. Indeed, he was the most successful producer in American television, turning out a seemingly endless string of international hit shows that included Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Hart to Hart and Dynasty. In terms of the number of shows he made, the audience they commanded and the wealth they generated, he had few rivals.







Fred Trueman, OBE, Yorkshire and England cricketer, was born on February 6, 1931. He died on July 1, aged 75

Fred Trueman was one of the great sporting characters of his time — a superb fast bowler, a renowned raconteur, striking in appearance and as confident in his opinions as he was forthright in expressing them. As a member of the BBC Test Match commentary team from 1974 until 1999 he would regularly fulminate against declining English standards by saying: “I just dawn’t understand what’s going on aht there.” He had been a master of swing, mostly away from the bat, and was yet able to win a Test match against Australia by reducing his pace and cutting the ball off a pitch favourable to such a method.







Kenneth Lay, businessman, was born on April 15, 1942. He died on July 5, aged 64

Kenneth Lay was the American businessman convicted of the largest fraud in corporate history, with Enron in 2004.

A budding politician, Lay was smitten with corporate America. “I had spent a lot of time on a tractor and had a lot of time to think,” he said in 1991. “I must confess, I was enamoured with business and industry. It was so different from the world in which I was living.”