Obituaries

Conor Cruise O'Brien's death, at 91, comes as a jolt. By the end, the Cruiser was something of a reactionary (his hostility to nationalism had led him to embrace Bob Macartney's UK Unionist Party) but that shouldn't detract from his achievements as a historian (especially his books on Parnell and Burke), journalist and public intellectual. Most of all, however, his death reminds one of how completely Ireland has changed in the past 20 years. The Cruiser's battles with Charlie Haughey (he was right about Haughey years before the full extent of the former Taoiseach's crookedness became widely apparent) and his fulminations on the national question have a certain antiquated feel now that the issue has, for the time being at least, been settled.

Another lovely obituary from the Daily Telegraph (of course) that is, as always, written with panache: Nick Mills, who has died aged 54, was a country vet with a practice which took him across the world as an anaesthetist for wild animals, an insurance adviser to the racing industry and a "sex therapist" to thoroughbreds at stud. Among the famous racehorses he examined before they were purchased or put out to stud were Epsom Derby winners such as Galileo and Benny the Dip. When the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem showed a lack of interest in the opposite sex, Mills made several journeys to Japan (where the horse was standing) and drew on his research with the Cambridge University veterinary school.

Cracking obituary in the Telegraph the other day: Julia Pirie, who has died aged 90, spent two decades as an MI5 agent at the heart of the Communist Party of Great Britain, most of it as personal assistant to the party's general secretary. A small, dumpy woman with the appearance of a confirmed and rather matronly spinster, Julia Pirie was the most unlikely of spies. But her unassuming demeanour masked a sharp intellect and the powers of observation essential for the task of a secret agent. She was recruited to infiltrate the party at the beginning of the 1950s, at a time when many Britons still remembered the Soviet Union as a valued wartime ally and Communists retained considerable influence within the trades union movement.

Sad news. Simon Gray, the playwright and memoirist, has died. Just last month I read the latest, and, I suppose, final installment of The Smoking Diaries, a wonderful, funny, poignant set of memoirs that I recommend without the slightest reservation. More importantly, sad because he was one of my father's oldest friends from Cambridge days way back when. Not many of them left. Booze and tobacco and all that. Telegraph obituary here. The Guardian's Michael Billington here. And a characteristically good Simon Hattenstone interview here. Understandably Gray rather disapproved of the notion that his memoirs may outlive his plays, but that's the nature of the respective genres. But I can't think of a better thing to read in what remains of this dismal summer than Simon Gray's diaries.

All the London papers' obituary pages reward close attention, but the Daily Telegraph remains peerless in tracking the lives and, obviously, deaths, of WW2 servicemen. These accounts of remarkable derring-do and extraordinary achievement under testing circumstances naturally seem more, not less, vital as the number of survivors dwindles. Thus this charming anecdote from today's obituary of Lieutenant 'Polly' Perkins, a motor torpedo boat captain who won two DSC's: On December 18/19 1944, by which time he had been promoted to command the long-range MTB 766, Perkins was hiding in the fjords during an operation to land and recover agents in Norway. He sent a rating ashore to obtain some Christmas trees for the forthcoming festivities.

As I always say, Scoop isn't really fiction. From John Gaskell's obituary in the Telegraph today: Plagued by ill-health, Gaskell reduced his commitments to working half a week   so that he could write a novel about obituaries. Unfortunately, he mentioned   this to a man he was interviewing, and the man then sold the idea to a   publisher as his own. The shorter hours, however, saved Gaskell’s bacon when   there was a cull of staff. Some weeks later he went to have his contract   renewed, and was told that the management had forgotten him: “We meant to   sack you.” Sadly, I suspect that these days there'd be no escaping the axe.

In its way, this anecdote - culled from AN Wilson's touching eulogy for the great Hugh Massingberd is a very telling illustration of how, regardless of technological changes, newspapers have got themselves into such a mess: Part of the secret of Hugh’s overwhelming charm was in his vulnerability. He played up the moments when he had been humiliated, and made jokes about them. But he also really did mind. Just when he thought the new obituaries page had got off to a flying start, a thrusting ‘exec’ on the Telegraph complained to him that there were too many heroic brigadiers with absurd nicknames, and moustachoied wing-commanders. ‘Why’, asked this person, ‘can’t you write about more young people on the obituaries page?

I have been remiss, gentle reader, in failing to post another corker from The Daily Telegraph's obituary pages. Lord Michael Pratt, who has died aged 61, will be remembered as one of the last Wodehouseian figures to inhabit London's clubland and as a much travelled author who pined for the days of Empire; he will also be remembered as an unabashed snob and social interloper on a grand scale. Pratt would arrive at country houses announcing that he was en route to another castle or (even larger) stately home, and was intending to stay for only one night. Quite often the "night" would turn into weeks, and sometimes months.