Anna Temkin - The Times Great Lives

GREAT LIVES

GREAT LIVES

a century in obituaries

Edited by Anna Temkin

Times Books

Published by Times Books

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Westerhill Road

Bishopbriggs

Glasgow G64 2QT

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Ebook first edition 2015

© Times Newspapers Ltd 2015

www.thetimes.co.uk

Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-816480-5, version 2015-08-18

The Times is a registered trademark of Times Newspapers Ltd

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover Image © Louise Gubb

Title GREAT LIVES a century in obituaries Edited by Anna Temkin Times Books

Copyright Published by Times Books An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Westerhill Road Bishopbriggs Glasgow G64 2QT www.harpercollins.co.uk Ebook first edition 2015 © Times Newspapers Ltd 2015 www.thetimes.co.uk Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-816480-5, version 2015-08-18 The Times is a registered trademark of Times Newspapers Ltd All rights reserved under International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. The contents of this publication are believed correct. Nevertheless the publisher can accept no responsibility for errors or omissions, changes in the detail given or for any expense or loss thereby caused. HarperCollins does not warrant that any website mentioned in this title will be provided uninterrupted, that any website will be error free, that defects will be corrected, or that the website or the server that makes it available are free of viruses or bugs. For full terms and conditions please refer to the site terms provided on the website. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover Image © Louise Gubb

Introduction

Abridged Introduction

Contents

Lord Kitchener

V. I. Lenin

Giacomo Puccini

Claude Monet

Emmeline Pankhurst

D. H. Lawrence

Dame Nellie Melba

Sir Edward Elgar

Marie Curie

Sigmund Freud

Amy Johnson

Virginia Woolf

David Lloyd George

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Adolf Hitler

General G. S. Patton

John Maynard Keynes

Henry Ford

Mahatma Gandhi

George Orwell

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Arnold Schoenberg

Joseph Stalin

Alan Turing

Henri Matisse

Sir Alexander Fleming

Albert Einstein

Humphrey Bogart

Arturo Toscanini

Christian Dior

Dorothy L. Sayers

Frank Lloyd Wright

Aneurin Bevan

Ernest Hemingway

Marilyn Monroe

President John F. Kennedy

Lord Beaverbrook

Ian Fleming

T. S. Eliot

Sir Winston Churchill

Le Corbusier

Yuri Gagarin

Martin Luther King

Enid Blyton

Bertrand Russell

Jimi Hendrix

President Gamal Abdel Nasser

Coco Chanel

Igor Stravinsky

Louis Armstrong

Duke of Windsor

Sir Noel Coward

Pablo Picasso

Charles Lindbergh

P. G. Wodehouse

Dame Agatha Christie

Field Marshal Montgomery

Mao Tse-tung

Benjamin Britten

Elvis Presley

Maria Callas

Charlie Chaplin

Jesse Owens

Jean-Paul Sartre

Sir Alfred Hitchcock

Mae West

John Lennon

Bob Marley

Group Captain Sir Douglas Bader

Orson Welles

Henry Moore

Andy Warhol

Jacqueline du Pré

Sir Frederick Ashton

Sugar Ray Robinson

Ayatollah Khomeini

Laurence Olivier

Dame Margot Fonteyn

Miles Davis

Menachem Begin

Francis Bacon

Elizabeth David

Willy Brandt

Rudolf Nureyev

Richard Nixon

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Fred Perry

Harold Wilson

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Diana, Princess of Wales

Mother Teresa

Frank Sinatra

Iris Murdoch

Stanley Kubrick

Yehudi Menuhin

Sir Alf Ramsey

Raisa Gorbachev

Sir Stanley Matthews

Dame Barbara Cartland

Sir John Gielgud

Sir Alec Guinness

Don Bradman

Christiaan Barnard

Spike Milligan

Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother

Ronald Reagan

Francis Crick

Pope John Paul II

Rosa Parks

Luciano Pavarotti

Sir Edmund Hillary

Michael Jackson

Elizabeth Taylor

Steve Jobs

Sir Bernard Lovell

Neil Armstrong

Baroness Thatcher

Seamus Heaney

Sir David Frost

Nelson Mandela

Lady Soames

Lord Attenborough

Sir Terry Pratchett

Lee Kuan Yew

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Publisher

Anna Temkin

Assistant Obituaries Editor, The Times

Perhaps the most effective way to study history is to read the obituaries of those who have shaped it. Many would agree there is no better place to do so than in the pages of The Times. Its notices have long been a prime source for scholars; to this day, contributors to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are invariably advised to start their research by consulting the relevant Times obituary.

The pieces chronologically assembled here, from Lord Kitchener to Lee Kuan Yew, form an enthralling snapshot of the past 100 years. Over that period The Times house style has of course changed – to include details of survivors, for example, and a final paragraph recording the date of birth and date of death. The comprehensive first edition of Great Lives, edited by Ian Brunskill, was published in 2005 and closed with the obituary of Pope John Paul II. In the ten years since, great lives have continued to be recorded in The Times. Many of these would be worthy of appearing in this second edition and the selection process has necessarily involved making invidious choices. Who to include and who to exclude, while still giving due coverage to the worlds of entertainment, sport et al? Apart from the two most high profile deaths in recent years – those of Baroness Thatcher and Nelson Mandela – the new contenders were generally open to debate. Choosing which to add and which, very reluctantly, to remove meant avoiding a number of risks: too many politicians (farewell Earl Attlee), too few writers (stay put Enid Blyton), too much music (so long Glenn Gould), not enough science (welcome Sir Bernard Lovell). All these were important considerations when updating this edition.