Category Archives: Obituary
David Gardner Remembered
In memory of David Gardner, friend and colleague David and I were not just colleagues but enduring friends over more than five decades from when we first started at Stonyhurst College aged thirteen. Those were formative years educationally with the Jesuits giving as a sense of human solidarity and openness to the world and the need to be active participants. He was always ahead of me intellectually and I followed his early teenage recommendation for expanding my learning. He was reading Orwell as an example of English essay writing and …
Robert Kee (5th October 1919- Jan 11th 2013)
Remembering Robert Kee: 1919-2013 I owe a personal tribute to Robert Kee, the writer and broadcaster, who has died aged 93. It was Robert who gave me my first real break in journalism and taught me much about what I came to admire about the profession. The year was 1977. Robert was planning a documentary for the excellent Yorkshire TV on Spain after Franco. Born in Madrid, and bilingual in English and Spanish, I had been juggling with Marxism , Spain and Latin America as a student , and …
Remembering my friend Cassandra Jardine
It’s never too late to grieve those who have a special place in our lives. If I write this tribute somewhat belatedly to Cassandra Jardine it is because I have only just discovered on the web that she died just under two weeks ago while wondering how she was. My search for some update news on her had been prompted by the discovery that an article in the Telegraph I had expected would have been just up her street on the celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebration in Battersea …
A Personal Tribute to Christopher Hitchens
The last time I spent any time with Christopher Hitchens was in the early summer of 2006. I was house-sitting in Georgetown researching a new book and he, with instinctive generosity towards a friend, insisted I’d come over to his apartment for supper ‘a deux’. I can’t remember what we ate. But I do remember we drank not insubstantial amounts of alcohol and consumed countless cigarettes as we talked into the early hours about God- he was writing his book against him at the time, and he wanted to know …
