Zélia Gattai, Brazilian writer, was born on July 2, 1916. She died on May 17, 2008, aged 91

A Brazilian writer, photographer and the widow of the Communist writer Jorge Amado, Zélia Gattai started writing as a sexagenarian and became a bestselling author in Brazil. She wrote vivid autobiographies that traced her left-wing childhood and her life with Amado. In 2002 she was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

In 1948 the Government declared the Brazilian Communist Party illegal, forcing Gattai and Amado to leave the country in exile. They first lived in Paris, where Gattai studied literature at the Sorbonne, and then moved to Prague. In 1979 Gattai wrote her first memoir, Anarchists, Thank God!, based on her childhood experiences in São Paulo. It became an instant bestseller in Brazil, where it was also dramatised as a television series. She wrote a further eight autobiographical works as well as a novel and three books for children. Gattai also published a collection of photographs of Amado.

Robert Rodden, archaeologist, was born on April 16, 1936. He died on July 30, 2008, aged 72

Bob Rodden became noted in the archaeological world almost half a century ago as the excavator of Nea Nikomedeia, a Neolithic village in northern Greece which was at the time, and for some considerable period afterwards, the oldest settled farming community known in Europe. Dating to about 6,000BC, it decisively refuted the idea that Europe’s first farmers were late arrivals, as the traditional pre-radiocarbon model had assumed.

Rodden carried out excellent horizontal stripping over three seasons between 1961 and 1964 that revealed the plans of mud-walled houses as well as the debris of early village life. An enticing report in The Illustrated London News was unfortunately not followed up with prompt full publication, and Nea Nikomedeia did not as a result take its proper place in the history of European archaeology until in 1996 a monograph was published by the British School at Athens

Robert James Rodden was born in Washington DC and became a professor of anthropology in the noted department at the University of California at Berkeley, where the quality of his undergraduate teaching and his collegiality were celebrated. However, in 1976 he decided to resign and move to England with his family, with the intention of setting up an archaeological consultancy in response to the boom in rescue excavation accompanying commercial development. The successful companies, however, proved to be those with large staffs able to respond to a range of situations, and Rodden’s was not the only small-scale enterprise that did not get off the ground.

R. H. Martin, professor of Classics, was born on November 16, 1915. He died on July 14, 2008, aged 92

Ronald Martin taught Classics at the University of Leeds for some 35 years, and published notable scholarly works on Latin comedy and Tacitus. These included an edition of Terence’s Phormio (1959), which was often reprinted, and an edition of Adelphoe (1976). Martin’s major articles on Tacitus’s style retain their importance.

His love of Latin and Greek was instilled at Bradford Grammar School and he went on to study Classics at the University of Leeds, graduating with a first. Thereafter he transferred to Cambridge University, taking a first in both parts of the Classical tripos.

His first post was at King’s College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which was then a constituent part of the University of Durham. After then spending a year at Southampton, he returned to the University of Leeds as assistant lecturer in classics in 1946, remaining a member of staff until his retirement in 1981. He was made lecturer in 1948, senior lecturer in 1955 and reader in 1968. Just before his retirement he was promoted to a personal chair in Classics.

After retirement he wrote and coauthored commentaries on Tacitus’s Annals. His interest in later Latin also led him to become a founder member of the Centre for Medieval Studies.