Commentariat

Times Obituaries

Susan Daniel writes: As Maria Callas’s maestro of choice during the
second part of her career, Nicola Rescigno (obituary,
Aug 7) was also her mentor — as he put it, her “father confessor”. I was
fortunate indeed to have been the recipient of many of the musical
traditions that they shared when he decided to teach me all of the same
repertoire. We worked together in depth for 16 years.

Michael Baxandall was one of the truly original and creative scholars of his
generation. His work as an art historian had a profound impact on broader
study of the humanities. He developed a radically new way of thinking about
the social and cultural significance of the visual arts based on close
analysis of the specifically visual qualities of the work he was studying.
This work ranged from Renaissance painting and sculpture to art of the
Enlightenment period and modern painting. His innovative approach to
analysing the language used in theoretical and critical writing about art,
and his insight into cultural practices that shaped ways of viewing art,
gave a particularly suggestive inflection to the art historical term the
“period eye” that he coined.

It was one of the most evocative of Cold War rituals. On Glienicke Bridge
linking East and West Berlin, prisoners held by each side would be
exchanged, sometimes in a blaze of publicity. In 1962 it was the US spy
plane pilot, Gary Powers, swapped for a Soviet spy. In 1986 it was the
Russian dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky, released to the West as part of a
larger exchange. They were moments of uneasy co-operation between the bitter
enemies of the two blocs. And always, lurking in the background, was the man
who had made the deal possible — Wolfgang Vogel, the East German lawyer,
confidant of top politicians and officials in both Cold War camps.

Sir Edwin Nixon

With their book, 100 Things to Do Before You Die, published in 1999,
Neil Teplica and Dave Freeman, who has died after a fall, created a vogue
for lists of activities that pushed against the envelope of natural human
indolence and encouraged an adventurous approach to travel.

Although he spent about a third of his long life in exile, the oil baron Iosif
Dragan was a devoted and passionate Romanian nationalist.

Behind the growth of political broadcasting in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s
was a woman who had joined the BBC straight from school at the age of 17:
Margaret Douglas.

Dick Stanbury was a career diplomat who as a district commissioner in the
Sudan Political Service in the late 1930s found himself judge, administrator
and police chief at the age of 21, governing areas the size of Wales, and
even, at one point, driving a train from Khartoum to Port Sudan during a
railway strike. Asked once how he would like to be remembered Stanbury
responded: Cornishman, man of God and son of Empire. To that one could add
erudite Classicist, first-class cricketer, enthusiastic polo player and
amusing raconteur. Like many of his generation he also had an unflinching
sense of honour and duty.

The Right Rev Anselm Genders, CR, was a member of the Community of the
Resurrection, often known as the Mirfield Fathers or even more simply CR,
for all of his ministry. He was also one of the last “colonial bishops”. For
a century from about 1,860 bishops were sent from Britain to run dioceses in
the far-flung parts of the British Empire. Although this practice largely
ended in the 1960s, Genders was sent to the tiny colony and diocese of
Bermuda in 1977 after many years’ service in the West Indies and southern
Africa.

In 1970 Colm Condon was, as Irish Attorney-General, responsible for directing
that the future Taoiseach Charles Haughey and Neal Blaney, both of whom had
just been dismissed as ministers, be prosecuted with three others on a
charge of conspiring to import arms illegally into the Republic — presumably
for use by those defending the Catholic ghettos in Belfast.

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

Whereas Kenneth Wolstenholme’s “they think it’s all over” somehow defined
England’s football World Cup triumph in 1966, rugby league’s most memorable
television moment came in unfortunate circumstances two years later at
Wembley, with Eddie Waring’s description of “the poor lad” and Don Fox’s
infamous missed kick from in front of the posts that would have won the 1968
Challenge Cup final in the last minute for Wakefield Trinity.

The name Buddy Harman is probably known only to the most committed fans, but
the records on which he played drums are familiar to everybody. In a career
as a Nashville session man lasting half a century, he provided the
percussive backbeat to literally thousands of recordings, including Roy
Orbison’s Oh, Pretty Woman, Patsy Cline’s Crazy,
Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire and Tammy Wynette’s Stand
by Your Man.

John Russell, journalist, art reviewer, art historian, exhibition organiser,
writer and man of letters, wrote more than 20 books and exhibition
catalogues and contributed essays to several more. He organised five major
exhibitions and wrote many thousands of articles and reviews for newspapers
and magazines, covering literature, music, drama, architecture, travel and
history, besides his main topic, art — art of whatever sort or period.

As the nation salutes the astonishing success of Team GB at the Games of the
XXIX Olympiad held in Beijing, Royal Mail and China Post have issued an
historic joint miniature sheet of four postage stamps to mark the handover
of the Olympic Flag from Beijing to London. This was made part of the
spectacular Closing Ceremony on August 24.

Adrian Sudbury was a young journalist who successfully campaigned for the
introduction of tuition on blood and bone marrow donation in British schools
before he died of leukaemia at the age of 27.

Peter Coke was an actor, playwright and sometime sculptor who will be best
remembered for his portrayal of Francis Durbridge’s urbane radio detective,
Paul Temple.

George Hume was general manager of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at
Stratford-upon-Avon, now the Royal Shakespeare Company, for ten years.
Brought in to be the director Anthony Quayle’s right-hand man, he presided
over the great Shakespeare revival, in which, as well as Quayle himself,
virtually all the biggest theatre names of the time took part: Richard
Burton, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft,
Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Peter Brook.

Jennifer Hilary was a beautiful actress of elegance, charm, innocence and
ethereal magic. She made her name in plays on the West End stage of the
1960s and 1970s that called out for real acting and got it. Later in the
Eighties and Nineties, except for Philip Prowse’s rediscovery of her at the
Glasgow Citizens’ in his 1999 revival of Coward’s Cavalcade,
she seemed inclined to fall back more and more on television and the cinema.

Jean O’Neill never attended university — or even school, being privately
educated at home — but became a dedicated amateur plantswoman whose
plant-recognition skills astounded even professional horticulturists and
botanists. To some, her facility seemed almost instinctive, but it was the
product of wide experience, a phenomenal memory and an eye for seeing
crucial similarities between seemingly different plants.

Paul Barrière, rugby league administrator, was born on June 8, 1920. He
died on May 29, 2008, aged 87

Bill Fuller was among a wave of Irish immigrants heading to the building sites
of England in the 1930s with no more than the price of a cup of tea in his
pocket. But by the time he died, he had set up the Electric Ballroom, in
Camden Town, and owned a string of nightclubs, a Nevada mine and a
successful building company.

Every summer, from 1969 until 1986, Horst Stein served the Bayreuth Festival
loyally as a reliable interpreter of Wagner’s mature music dramas. Invisible
in the Festspielhaus’s hooded pit, this tubby and diminutive figure provided
apt musical counterpart to the traditional productions staged by Wolfgang
Wagner, more naturalistic, less severe revisions of the neu-Bayreuth
abstractions of his late brother, Wieland, which had so vexed audiences in
the 1950s and 1960s.

As leader of the “Brolly Brigade” as Fleet Street dubbed the Civil and Public
Services Association (CPSA), Britain’s largest union for civil servants, Ken
Thomas led civil servants in some fierce disputes with the Government over
pay and pensions in the strike-prone 1970s and early 1980s, notably fighting
a losing battle with Margaret Thatcher’s Government.

Sir Edwin Nixon ran the British arm of IBM during the computer company’s
golden age. He joined in 1955 when IBM was better known for cardboard punch
cards than silicon processors. By the time he retired in 1990 Big Blue had
been eclipsed by Microsoft and the desktop PC. In between times the company
made its name as the company whose products got nobody fired.