A new book, Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries, collects 124 Times obituaries of notable 20th-century figures.

The book is available at £18, including p&p, from Times Books First. To order, call 0870 1608080 or visit www.booksfirst.co.uk



Obituaries are about lives, not death. The lives of the exceptional individuals collected in the book are first drafts of history which to a remarkable degree have stood the test of time. As these extracts show, they offer a revealing history both of the times in which they lived and of the changing Times.




V. I. LENIN

He was ultimately responsible for the terror as for all the main lines of Bolshevist policy. Under Soviet rule the Russian people suffered unheard of calamity. To Lenin, this mattered little. When the famine came in 1921 he remarked, with a scornful smile, “It’s a trifle if 20 millions or so die.”

1924



SIGMUND FREUD

There is something incongruous in speaking of Freud as a doctor. Rather he was a philosopher, using the methods of science to achieve therapeutic ends. Philosophy, science, and medicine all paid him the tributes of excessive admiration and excessive hostility.

The truth would seem to be that even at this late date the time has not yet arrived when a just estimate of psychoanalysis and its founder is possible. The atmosphere is too highly charged with controversy. Supporters and opponents are still in too bitter a mood. One can neither affirm that Freud’s teaching will stand the test of time, nor deny that it may change permanently the whole conception of the operations of the human mind.

Read the full obituary

1939



ADOLF HITLER

The house-painter who became for a while master of Europe cannot be denied the most remarkable talents. He found Germans depressed, bewildered, aimless. After five years in office he had united the German race in a single Reich, abolished regional diversities of administration and got rid of unemployment. But these achievements were merely instruments of an overwhelming lust for power.

Hitler effected the triumph of the Nazi Party in Germany by a mixture of deceit and violence; he then employed the same devices to destroy other nations. From the time he became master of Germany he made lies, cruelty and terror his principal means to achieve his ends; and he became in the eyes of virtually the whole world an incarnation of absolute evil.

1945





HENRY FORD

From war he refused to profit. At this period indeed the magician in production stood in strange contrast to the unrealistic pacifist who, as leader of a group of cranks, went in the Peace Ship to Scandinavia in order to have the “boys out of the trenches by Christmas, never to return”. It was the foolishness of a child, but the intention was entirely sincere.

1947



MAHATMA GANDHI

When Independence Day came the sanguinary unrest in Calcutta led to fears that the division of Bengal would have untoward consequences. “Bapu”, who had been travelling from place to place in Eastern Bengal and in Bihar preaching brotherhood, went to Calcutta, and at the beginning of September undertook another fast not to be ended until normal conditions were restored. The party leaders exerted themselves in exhortations to the people, and on the fourth day the mahatma was able to end his ordeal. Thus he succeeded where armed force had failed.

Read the full obituary

1948





ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The announcement of Ernest Hemingway’s death at the age of 61 can, in a sense, come as no surprise to his readers. Death was always one of his principal themes as a writer, and he had himself been confronting it directly ever since he had broken away from the suburban environment in which he had been raised, to volunteer in 1918 for service on the Italian front as a driver with the Red Cross field ambulances. “By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next.” He was fond of the quotation and used it as a touchstone of conduct.

1961





ENID BLYTON

Her success was not loved by the public librarians who in some cases imposed sanctions against her books. Children asked for her books and were told they were not in stock. Cold war broke out. While the librarians were probably unwise to display their prejudices so openly, Miss Blyton was perhaps wrong in contending that children should have whatever they liked no matter what other books were squeezed out. She did not frequently get what is called good press and over the years became as cagey as Marie Corelli about herself and her affairs.

1968





JIMI HENDRIX

In direct contrast to the violence and seeming anarchy of his music, Hendrix was a gentle, peaceful man whose only real concern was music. His final public appearance was when he sat in with War, an American band, at Ronnie Scott’s club in London last Wednesday, and it was typical of the man that it was he who felt honoured by being allowed to play.

1970





IGOR STRAVINSKY

One could identify the deep mysticism of the Slav, the debonair gaiety of the Frenchman, the affability and thirst for knowledge of the American; but these traits were personal rather than environmental, just as his music remained completely idiosyncratic whether Grieg, Bach, Machaut or Boulez was his model. He may have hidden his face behind masks of other men, but his personality imprinted itself upon the whole face of music for over half a century, perhaps for the rest of time.

1971 ()

MARIA CALLAS

In the age of the common man, when even sopranos, whatever their quality, are expected to be rather like everybody else, Callas insisted upon being entirely herself.

She was as fiery in her dealings with conductors and impresarios as was her Tosca — a role she never relinquished — in dealing with Baron Scarpia. Like any of the great sopranos of the past she knew her work and expected to dominate conductors and colleagues as well as her audiences.

1977





CHARLES CHAPLIN

As with Chaplin’s performances, so with his career the secret of his success lay in immaculate timing. Even in the early days Chaplin off screen, the budding tycoon and central figure in many an over-publicised romantic drama, was sharply differentiated from the somewhat pathetic underdog he played in films, with his cane and baggy pants, his slum-bred cunning, and his understandable tendency to be overlooked by the girl of his dreams. By the beginning of the 1920s he was his own master in films, able to do exactly what he wanted, in exactly the way he wanted — and in his own time.

Read the full obituary

1977





JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

His death removes from the world literary, philosophical and political scene one of the most brilliant and versatile writers as well as one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century. He stood alone among Western writers in his attempt to combine the thinking of Marx, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Mao and Marcuse into a coherent world view. Truly French in his passion for ideas, he was also European by the range of his philosophical interest, and a figure of worldwide importance by the extent of his literary concerns and his general influence. From the moment in the early 1940s that his books and plays began to be widely read, no novelist, playwright, philosopher, psychologist or political thinker could hope to grasp anything of the complexity of the modern world without taking Sartre’s views into account.

1980



MAE WEST

In play after play and film after film she embodied voluptuously proportioned sirens who took a frank sexual interest in the physique of the men in their lives and chose for themselves (the classic invitation “Come up and see me some time” was offered at and for the lady’s pleasure only).

By making sex a shared joke, she defused the subject of much of its offensive power — though not enough for many in the 1920s and 1930s, when she was constantly the target of outraged moralists.

1980





JOHN LENNON

His caustic wit, his intellectual sharpness and perhaps his sense of what was likely to be good for the mental health of a group of young men caught up in the success which overtook the Beatles were formative influences on the way the Beatles behaved. It was he who, in particular, disliked the fact that the Beatles appeared to have become the property of their more respectable fans. And when first the distancing from, and then the alienation of, those fans began with the retreat into kaftans, joss sticks and drugs, it bore the hallmarks of Lennon’s cast of mind and intellectual preoccupations.

Read the full obituary

1980



DOUGLAS BADER

His dazzling wartime career changed abruptly when he had to abandon his Spitfire over German-occupied France after colliding with an Me 109F near St Omer. There he was entertained by the Luftwaffe, who were anxious to meet their distinguished opponent, and made the acquaintance of Oberstleutnant Adolf Galland, his “opposite number”. One of his artificial legs was recovered from his crashed aircraft; it was damaged and the RAF flew him out a replacement.

Bader escaped from the hospital, but was betrayed and recaptured. There followed a succession of removals from one prisoner-of-war camp to another caused by his unflagging determination to escape and his intractable and aggressive attitude towards his captors. This led inevitably to Colditz.

1982





LAURENCE OLIVIER

Even his legendary howl of anguish as the blinded Oedipus, a sound which Kenneth Tynan said would echo under the boards of the New Theatre for ever, had an external source. “In the Arctic,” he once explained, “they put down salt and the ermine comes to lick it, and his tongue freezes to the ice. I thought of that when I screamed as Oedipus.”

1989





FRANCIS BACON

He had little regard for abstract art, which in his view avoided the challenge that made painting worthwhile. For him the proper subject for art was the human figure, and specifically the portrait. He painted the same close friends over and over, working from photographs and memory, placing them in simple interiors, naked or clothed, and concentrating on their faces with what to many observers seemed to be sadistic violence.

1992



The book is available at £18, including p&p, from Times Books First. To order, call 0870 1608080 or visit www.booksfirst.co.uk