British philosopher Sir Stuart Hampshire has died at the age of 89. The Telegraph has “a very interesting obituary”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/15/db1501.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/06/15/ixportal.html . I’ll add others to this post as they appear: “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1239568,00.html , “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1146540,00.html .
From the category archives:
Obituary
bq. Well, the first thing I want to say is.”Mandate my ass!”
The demise of Ronald Reagan made me dust off my copy of the magnificent Gil Scott-Heron’s B-Movie/R-Ron (double-A-side-single). I’ve not managed to find even the lyrics to Re-Ron anywhere on the web, but B-movie is “here”:http://olrajtovics.atw.hu/nujazz.html (right sidebar) and you can download the music too (with what legality I can’t say).
The poet Thom Gunn has died, and there are obituaries in the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/books/28GUNN.html , “the Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1089982,00.html and the “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1204724,00.html . A friend introduced me to Gunn’s work about twenty years ago and there are some lines from “Elegy” from “The Passages of Joy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374517967/junius-20 (1982) that have stuck in my mind ever since I first read them:
bq. There will be no turn of the river
where we are all reunited
in a wonderful party
the picnic spread
all the lost found
as in hide and seek.
A sad loss.
John Maynard Smith, pioneer of the application of game theory to evolutionary biology, has died. There are obituaries in the “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1082979,00.html , “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1200211,00.html and “Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/22/db2201.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/04/22/ixopright.html .
Norris McWhirter, the man responsible for the Guinness Book of Records, and, arguably, the British public obsession with meaningless facts has just died. Read the obituary, which has entirely admirable people saying very nice things about him. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead so I won’t.
I wrote what I wanted to say about Alistair Cooke when he announced, not very long ago, that he didn’t feel he could continue to write his ‘Letter from America’ any more.
Well, (to steal a favourite Cooke sentence-opener), AC died today, so the ‘Letter’ really is done forever, and there’s no hope of a reprise.
Over at The Virtual Stoa, “Chris Brooke reports”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_02_01_archive.html#107798928814598472 that Paul M. Sweezy, author of _The Theory of Capitalist Development_ and editor of the Monthly Review for many decades has died. Chris will be posting links to obituaries as they appear.