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Corin Redgrave: Actor whose involvement in radical politics kept him away from stage and screen for two decades

With his genetic inheritance – his father was one of the stage greats of his era, Sir Michael Redgrave, and his mother, Rachel Kempson, was a distinguished actress – it was hardly surprising that Corin Redgrave, like his sisters Vanessa and Lynn, should choose a career in the theatre. After an early period of promise which included some performances for the Royal Shakespeare Company marking him out as a significant talent, his involvement with radical politics (often in alliance with his elder sister Vanessa) took him away from the theatre for two decades. His return in the 1990s was an extraordinary comeback, seeing him ceaselessly active as director (opening a new theatre venture, the Garrick at Lichfield, in 2003), theatrical campaigner (lobbying against the proposed demolition of the Arts Theatre in London), writer and actor on stage and screen. Intriguingly, some of his later stage successes were in roles associated with his father, including Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version, Frank Elgin in The Country Girl and King Lear for the RSC.

Born just before the outbreak of the Second World War in London, he was christened Corin William (Corin after the character in As You Like It, in which his father had scored an early success opposite Edith Evans). His strong-willed and strong-voiced paternal grandmother vetoed William Corin, insisting that future schoolmates would mock the "W.C." initials. He spent most of his early years in the idyllic surroundings of Bromyard, near Worcester, in a house hideous from the outside but comfortable and rambling within which belonged to his mother's cousin Lucy Wedgwood.

Far from London's bombs he and Vanessa (and Lynn from 1942) had a childhood of books, abundant eggs and cream and games; theatre was a passion, with self-penned, -acted and -directed playlets performed in the house or on garden terraces, with hand-written programmes and, inside, rows of light-bulbs as footlights. With their parents often in London or on tour, or in their father's case on location and in film studios after his naval service, the children saw little of them until after the war and the family's move to one of London's most beautiful houses, on the Thames at Chiswick.

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Redgrave's first school – a Malvern establishment run by a headmaster both supercilious and uncaring – was a miserable experience and he moved to Westminster, where he excelled both academically and in school plays (his Portia in The Merchant of Venice was something of a Westminster legend and he was allowed to play Dunois' Page in Saint Joan at the Embassy Theatre when his mother played the title role). He was a golden boy at Cambridge, also; he chose King's, where Dadie Rylands (who had directed Michael Redgrave for the Marlowe Society in the 1920s) still kept an avuncular eye on young theatrical talent. Part of an especially strong theatrical generation of undergraduates – Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Clive Swift among them – Redgrave dazzled in revue and classics alike while collecting a First in English.

Nepotism helped him get his first break – Kempson had been a member of the first English Stage Company of 1956 at the Royal Court – when he went to Sloane Square as assistant to the director Tony Richardson in 1962. Nepotism rarely secures subsequent jobs however, and Redgrave had to audition before Richardson cast him as Lysander in a highly physical A Midsummer Night's Dream (Royal Court, 1962) which the press panned despite a talented young cast including his sister Lynn, also making her professional début. Also at the Court he played a Sebastian of romantic yearning in an adventurous Twelfth Night (1962) and made a considerable impact as the Pilot Officer in Arnold Wesker's Chips With Everything (Royal Court and Vaudeville, 1962), in which he also made his Broadway debut.

By now married to a bright, extrovert 1960s charmer, Deirdre Hamilton-Hill, Redgrave was establishing himself; he revealed an unexpectedly astute drollery as an exquisitely tailored Cecil Graham, a dandy resembling an etiolated Spy cartoon, in a revival of Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (Phoenix, 1966). Redgrave and Ciaran Madden, like their predecessors Keith Michell and Diana Rigg, made the plodding Abelard and Heloise (Wyndham's, 1972) – noteworthy mostly for a brief and murkily lit nude scene – seem decidedly better than it was on taking over the title roles.

A leap forward in critical and public estimation came with Redgrave's outstanding RSC performance as Octavius Caesar in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra (Stratford, 1972, Aldwych, 1973). Particularly with the greater exposure in the latter, opposite Janet Suzman and Richard Johnson in the title roles in Trevor Nunn's production, Redgrave revealed a chilly blond Roman arrogance which immediately distanced him from the perfumed voluptuousness of Egypt, gradually exposing a master of the intricate tactics of realpolitik. Coinciding with a few noteworthy film roles, beginning with the son-in-law of Paul Scofield's Thomas More in Fred Zinnemann's A Man for All Seasons (1966), and including his perkily optimistic Brother Bertie, cheerfully riding off to the front on the pier-fairground train of Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Redgrave's career seemed set fair to bloom.

It was at this stage that his political involvement, growing from CND days, began to take over, and his marriage collapsed in 1975 partly due to that pressure. Redgrave did not consciously abandon acting but as he veered to what much of the theatrical establishment regarded as extremist policies (not least over his challenges to many of the policy decisions taken by the actors' trade union Equity) it is undeniable that avenues became closed to him (he always believed that the BBC in effect blacklisted him).

With his burning conviction in the ideals of the Trotskyite Workers' Revolutionary Party, in which he and Vanessa were the most prominent figures, in the later 1970s he moved to Yorkshire, where the party's headquarters and study centres were based. Many old colleagues saw only a self-blinded fanatic; his father, who had shrunk from left-wing involvement after a wartime episode over his involvement with the People's Convention (Communist-backed, as it transpired) which saw him blacklisted by the BBC, never criticised him, even if he did not always fully comprehend his son's logic, and nor did his mother. The knee-jerk recoil of many in his profession (and often, too, in a hostile press) overlooked or misunderstood the reasoning which underpinned his compulsion to battle for what he saw as a more just society. As with his father, a deep shyness could on occasion lead to an impression of gelid aloofness, but Redgrave was a genuinely courteous, caring man of passionate convictions.

Following a rancorous split in the WRP and after a happy second marriage to Kika Markham – daughter of an old colleague of his father's, David Markham, whose socialist beliefs influenced both Michael and Corin – Redgrave's astonishing professional renaissance began. Some said he became a much-improved actor only after his father's death (in 1985); performances such as his Octavius somewhat refute the argument, but a certain coldness and physical constraint seemed to loosen and thaw. He never abjured politics, although he and Vanessa came to believe that human rights was the greatest issue, founding in 2004 the Peace and Progress Party.

In his father's 1950s success (then titled Winter Journey) of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl (Greenwich, 1995) he took on the hugely challenging part of Frank Elgin, the alcoholic has-been star trying for a Broadway comeback. The production was sadly muffled, but he still found a moving pathos in this wreck of a man with a spark of genius still fitfully flickering.

A welcome return to the RSC in The General from America (Stratford, 1996) saw Redgrave in a somewhat underwritten role as George Washington, while his first National Theatre experience was in a below-par Marat/Sade (National, 1997).

Back in the commercial theatre with Noël Coward's A Song at Twilight (King's Head and Gielgud, 1998) Redgrave joined his wife (playing his wife) and sister Vanessa (as his ex-mistress) to play the famous old writer Hugo Latymer fighting off blackmail and exposure in his Swiss hotel suite. More than a few press pieces seized on the piquancies of Redgrave's appearance in a play structured round a character with a secret bisexual life (pace Redgrave père) written by Coward, for a time their father's lover. But the play was inspired more by Max Beerbohm or Somerset Maugham and Redgrave's performance, face and voice suggesting fathoms of banked emotions was the revelation of the evening.

The best was yet to come. The National Theatre's premiere of an early Tennessee Williams piece, Not About Nightingales (1998) was a shattering prison drama with a performance of impressive, sweaty menace from Redgrave. He and Vanessa made a wonderful brother-and-sister act as Ranevskya and Gayev in Trevor Nunn's The Cherry Orchard (National, 2000). His Gayev was an innocent child with a kernel of selfishness, a performance packed with finely observed detail. Also at the National he played Oscar Wilde with a movingly weary sense of waste in De Profundis (2000) and made up another triumphant pairing, with John Wood, in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land (2001).

Redgrave had been ill with prostate cancer but recovered to play King Lear at the RSC. The production opened with panache: a huge table surrounded by the spotlit faces of an expectant court, be tricked when a seemingly doddery ancient staggered on then flung away his stick roaring with laughter, a dangerously wilful monarch. But it faltered when approaching the empyrean of real tragedy. Redgrave's performance was sporadically brilliant with some stunning new-minted line-readings, but on too few occasions did it stab the heart.

Happier was his tour de force as the critic Kenneth Tynan (once his father's bugbear) in Tynan (Stratford, 2004, and Arts, 2005); he never moved from his chair and made no great effort at impersonation, but the evocation of Tynan's aphoristic talent was funny and affecting. Tynan was as engrossing as his own solo play Blunt Speaking (Chichester, 2002) centred round his father's old Cambridge friend Anthony Blunt and his exposure as a traitor. In that, as in so many of his later performances – including a heart-wrenching portrayal of Crocker-Harris, the repressed schoolmaster of Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version at Derby Playhouse in 1997 – Redgrave demonstrated his talent for playing riven men, often with double lives.

His theatrical rebirth was paralleled on screen. Later films rarely gave him major roles, but he had an aristocratic aplomb as Andie McDowell's husband in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and had several strong scenes in Enigma (2001). Redgrave had tackled little television earlier in his career, although he gave a splendid performance of apparently spontaneous charm cloaking the predatory core of Steerforth in David Copperfield (1969). Later he appeared in many series – several of Lynda La Plante's Trial and Retribution included – and was extremely fine as the wispy Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion (1995). But his finest work on the smaller screen was in the re-make of The Forsyte Saga (2002) as the elder Jolyon. He suffered a heart attack in 2005, but continued to do good radio work, and last year appeared in Trumbo, about the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

Corin Redgrave should have written more. He was a talented writer and for radio, in addition to the original Blunt Speaking, he wrote Roy and Daisy, a delightful programme based on the stormy relationship between his paternal grandparents, touring players both. His memoir, My Father, Michael Redgrave (1995), was beautifully written, a beguiling evocation of childhood, and although not a formal biography it gave a portrait of his complex father so compassionate and understanding as to belie his claim that "biography is a kind of revenge".

Alan Strachan

Corin William Redgrave, actor, director, writer and campaigner: born London 16 July 1939; married 1962 Deirdre Hamilton-Hill (marriage dissolved 1981; died 1997; one son, one daughter;), 1985 Kika Markham (two sons); died London 6 April 2010.
Independent

Christopher Cazenove: 'Dynasty' actor whose aristocratic bearing led to typecasting as the upper-class Englishman

The life of Christopher Cazenove was in some ways almost as full of incident as his acting career, encompassing as it did a difficult relationship with his father, a stop-start marriage and the tragic death of a beloved son.

The actor resisted the advice of his father, a brigadier in the Coldstream Guards, to pursue a military career and instead chose a life in drama. One irony lay in the fact that his big acting breakthrough came when he portrayed a dashing soldier in The Regiment, an early 1970s TV drama series. A second irony was that he believed this role helped shape his subsequent career.

Although he achieved a certain fame in the 1980s for his role as Ben Carrington, a scheming businessman in the glossy American soap Dynasty, he spent much of his career depicting Englishmen from aristocratic and often military backgrounds. His good looks, his charm and his upper-crust air – he went to Eton – meant he was often cast in upper-middle-class roles, often in costume dramas set around the beginning of the 20th century.

He once said ruefully: "When I started out, I had a game plan to end up with the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre. But The Regiment really put the kibosh on that. After that I was perceived as a total toff and too commercial. Perhaps that's why I have never been offered a job at the RSC – or maybe it's because they think I'm awful."

But if he never reached the highest echelons of his craft he was much in demand in the theatre, on television and occasionally in films. A typical role in later life saw him playing Professor Henry Higgins on stage in My Fair Lady.

His versatility was such that he could play both the sophisticated hero and the low-down scoundrel. In Dynasty, which made him a household name in the mid-1980s, he played "a real cad." He observed: "Playing a nasty gives one a much better chance – nasty characters are so much more interesting than wimps."

He enthused of Dynasty: "I've always adored the series. Way over the top it may be, but it's wonderful escapism and great fun." He also marvelled at the money, which was way beyond anything available over here.

He credited Joan Collins with helping him gain entrance into the US movie scene. "Before Joan made such an enormous impact in Dynasty, a true Brit accent wasn't a particular advantage in Hollywood," he said. "I know, because I spent three years trying to break in as a foreigner, with scarcely any luck at all."

Cazenove described himself as a rule-breaker at Eton. His worst memory was being caned: "All six prefects were there to witness the beating," he recalled. "I'll never forget the humiliation of bending over to touch my toes while this boy gave me six of the best."

He worked as a nanny, a teacher, a cinema attendant and a chauffeur in France before training as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. In 1973 he married Angharad Rees, who like him was well-known for playing period parts. Her role in the popular series Poldark made her a major television figure.

Although their marriage lasted two decades, it included lengthy periods of separation. In a number of frank interviews after their divorce, Cazenove looked back: "I enjoyed being married very much. We still love each other very much – we just find it difficult to live together. We are very good friends and I think we probably have the best of all possible worlds now. I don't regret anything."

The couple's post-divorce relationship was so good that friends hoped they might get together again, but Cazenove said: "I know there are people just dying for us to get married again, but it's not going to happen."

The great tragedy for the couple came in 1999, five years after their divorce, when their eldest son Linford died in a car accident. He had just completed his education and was intent on a career in the theatre.

Cazenove said of his death: "If he had to go, he went at an incredibly good time, if I can put it that way. He was on such a high. He had just got his master's degree at Cambridge University and was so happy, so excited, at forming his own theatre company.

"I don't think I have suppressed any feelings of anger or bitterness. I have let it go. Many tears have been shed and are still being shed. That's the way it should be."

Cazenove's companion for almost a decade before his death was his partner Isabel Davis. She and members of his family, including his surviving son Rhys, were at his hospital bedside when he died of the blood disorder septicaemia.

A statement from the family and Davis said: "All who knew and loved him will be devastated by the loss of this incredible man who touched so many lives."

David McKittrick

Christopher Cazenove, actor: born Winchester 17 December 1945; married 1973 Angharad Rees (divorced 1994; one son, and one son deceased); died 7 April 2010.
Independent

Malcolm McLaren obituary
Manager of the Sex Pistols, entrepreneur, conceptualist and a renowned orchestrator of outrage


Guardian

Kenneth McKellar; singer

Kenneth McKellar, who has died aged 82, was one of Scotland’s greatest ambassadors of song, a tenor who could shatter an exile’s heart with his rendering of My Love is like a Red Red Rose.

Born June 23 1927

Died April 9, 2010

Herald Scotland

Alan Sillitoe
Alan Sillitoe, who died on April 25 aged 82, was a novelist, poet and occasional playwright but, despite a long and varied writing career, remained best known for his first two books.
Telegraph

Actress Lynn Redgrave dies at 67

The actress Lynn Redgrave has died aged 67.

She starred in the 1960s hit film Georgy Girl and had many other successes on stage and screen.

Her publicist, Rick Miramontez, speaking on behalf of her children, said she died on Sunday night at her home in New York.

She was treated for breast cancer in 2003.

Her death comes a year after her niece Natasha Richardson died from head injuries sustained in a skiing accident and only a month after the death of her older brother, Corin Redgrave.

ITN

Lena Horne

Lena Horne, who died on May 9 aged 92, was a singer, actress, civil rights activist and, eventually, a showbusiness phenomenon, after a career spanning more than 70 years.

Although she did not regard herself as a jazz singer, she had a formidable sense of rhythm and an easy-going style which went well in a jazz context. As a film actress she had notable success in Stormy Weather (in which she sang the title song) and Cabin In The Sky. Her refusal to play demeaning roles, or to allow her light complexion to be darkened with make-up, made enemies in Hollywood but in the long run brought her great public respect.

Telegraph

Dennis Hopper dies

Cult actor Dennis Hopper has died from complications of prostate cancer aged 74.

The hard-living screen star died at his home in the coastal Los Angeles suburb of Venice on Saturday morning surrounded by family and friends.

In a varied career spanning more than 50 years, Hopper appeared alongside his mentor James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant in the 1950s and played maniacs in films like Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet and Speed.

He received two Oscar nominations - for writing Easy Rider (with co-star Peter Fonda and Terry Southern), and for a rare heartwarming turn as an alcoholic high-school basketball coach in the 1986 drama Hoosiers.

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Photographer Brian Duffy dies

Duffy helped to define the 60s with images spanning celebrity, reportage and advertising

Together with David Bailey and Terence Donovan, Duffy formed part of the trinity of photographers who became as famous as the models, musicians and film stars they worked with.

He had been suffering from lung disease.

Guardian

Senior Scots nobleman, the Duke of Hamilton, dies

One of Scotland's most senior noblemen, the Duke of Hamilton, has died, Buckingham Palace has announced.

Angus Alan Douglas-Hamilton, who suffered from dementia, died on Saturday at the age of 71.

A spokesman for Buckingham Palace said: "The Queen is sending a personal message of sympathy to the family."

The duke was the Premier Peer of Scotland and was the Hereditary Keeper of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen's official residence in Scotland.

He could trace his ancestry back to Mary Queen of Scots and was custodian of the family's 14th Century seat, Lennoxlove House in East Lothian.

The Hamilton dukedom is the oldest in Scotland, dating back to the mid-17th century.

BBC

Marvin Isley, bassist in Isley Brothers, dies age 56

Mail

Gilly Coman obituary

Actor with starring role in 80s sitcom Bread

Gilly Coman death Actor Gilly Coman was planning to return to work after her youngest child had completed GSCEs. Photograph: Martin Keene/PA

The actor Gilly Coman, who has died of a suspected heart attack aged 54, was catapulted to national fame as Aveline, Ma Boswell's precious daughter, in Carla Lane's television sitcom Bread, which followed the working-class, devoutly Catholic, Liverpudlian Boswell family as they exploited the social security system in Thatcher's Britain.

Aveline was an aspiring model with red hair who dressed in miniskirts, stockings and high heels. She was cosseted by her mother, Nellie (Jean Boht), and four brothers, who vetted her boyfriends and made her wear a whistle around her neck in case of attack. Coman gave a bit of her own dizzy personality to Aveline, carving out one of the most memorable characters in the show.

When Bread started in 1986, more than three million people across Britain were unemployed. Critics disliked the programme – particularly for its stereotypical portrayal of scousers sponging off the state – but it soon became popular, and when Aveline married Oswald, a Protestant vicar, in 1988, it drew an audience of more than 21 million. After four series, Coman left to have her first child, and Melanie Hill took over the role. Bread lasted for another three series.

Coman was born in Liverpool, where her parents ran a ballroom dancing school. At the age of eight, she joined the city's Shelagh Elliot-Clarke school of drama. Two years later, she appeared in a Ready Brek commercial. On leaving school, she gained repertory experience at theatres including the Liverpool Playhouse.

She had her first TV role in 1978, when she was cast in Coronation Street as Judy, who flirted with Deirdre's husband, Ray Langton, at a party. Three years later, she was back in the soap as Sugar La Marr, a stripper who performed at Fred Gee's stag party, though in an uncharacteristic instance of prudishness, the Rovers Return cellarman refused to let Sugar complete her routine and drove her home still fully clothed. Coman took a third role in the serial in 1983, as a receptionist working at Mike Baldwin's newly opened Graffiti Club. By then, she had also appeared on the London stage, in 1980 at the Young Vic, in Stags and Hens, a play by the Liverpudlian writer Willy Russell.

Before her role in Bread (1986-88), Coman appeared in the first two episodes of Boys from the Blackstuff (1982, as a benefit office clerk) and in Jim Allen's period drama serial The Gathering Seed (1983). She was a regular as Marie Morgan, lusted after by the schoolboy of the title, in another Bleasdale series, Scully (1984). There were many bit parts, including one in the film comedy A Private Function (1984) and another in the TV sitcom Open All Hours (1985), alongside Ronnie Barker.

Later, in the BBC play Snatched (in the Against All Odds series of true-life dramas, 1994), Coman won good reviews for her starring role as Linda McNeill, who staged a daring plan to get back her three children after they were abducted by her Turkish Cypriot husband. She was Liz Freeman in the drama serial Springhill (1996-97), set on a Liverpool estate, and Marigold Lockton, a neglected wife who hires the attractive title character in the mini-series The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous (1997), based on Jilly Cooper's novel.

Coman was married to Phil Cutts, a photographer, with whom she had three sons and one daughter; they all survive her. Although she retired from acting in 2000 to focus on bringing up her family, she had planned to return to work after her youngest child had completed GCSEs.

• Gillian Helen Coman, actor, born 13 September 1955; died 13 July 2010
Obsever

Tony Judt: Celebrated academic and historian of modern Europe who remained eloquent in the face of devastating illness

By Martin Childs


Tony Judt was a renowned British historian and intellectual who won accolades on both sides of the Atlantic for his tome on post-war 1945 Europe, but was equally known for his outspoken and stingingly controversial essays on the state of Israel, Britain's and Europe's futures and American foreign policy.

Judt described himself as a 'universalist social democrat' and later in life displayed a profound suspicion of left-wing ideologies, of identity politics, and of the American role as the world's sole superpower.

Diagnosed in Autumn 2008 with Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Judt decided to write a series of essays that took an intensely personal and reflective turn. He started writing about his illness and personal memories as the incurable disease attacked his nervous system, ravaging him with devastating speed. Within months, he was a quadriplegic who needed an apparatus to help him breathe. Yet his mental faculties were undiminished and he found himself on an intellectual journey that one observer called 'a forced march of the mind.' His musings and reflections culminated in his final book, 'Ill Fares the Land' published in March this year, which was deliberately written as a letter to young people. In an interview in the same month he explained, 'It's about not forgetting the past, about having the courage to look at the present and see its faults without walking away in disgust or scepticism. It's about believing.'

The son of Jewish émigrés, Tony R Judt was born on 2 January 1948 in Putney, south London into a secular Jewish family. His mother's parents had emigrated from Russia and his father was from Belgium and descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis. At the age of 15, following a year on a kibbutz in Israel, Judt became active in the Jewish Labour Youth Movement, Dror, and served as the organisation's national secretary from 1965-67. 'I was the ideal recruit, articulate, committed and uncompromisingly ideologically conformist,' he wrote in an autobiographical sketch for The New York Review of Books in February 2010.

However, Judt soon turned away from the Zionists' utopian vision after spending several weeks as a translator with the Israeli defence Forces in the newly conquered Golan Heights, after the Six-Day War in 1967. He was troubled by the nonchalant and callous attitude of the Israeli officers he worked with, later calling them 'right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views.'

Upon returning to England, he went to read History at King's College, Cambridge, where he earned his bachelor's degree, in 1969, and his doctorate in 1972. In between, he studied at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. His dissertation, on the French socialist party's re-emergence after World War I, was published in France as La Reconstruction du Parti Socialiste: 1921-1926 (1976). His love affair with French politics continued and in 1979, he followed up with 'Socialism in Provence, 1871-1914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left', and in 1986, he published 'Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981'. These relatively specialist works led to two interpretive studies of French post-war intellectual life, 'Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956' (1994) and 'The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century' (1998).

Judt shocked many French and American intellectuals with these last two books as he dared to criticise the Soviet Union and third-world revolutionary movements. His target, he wrote, was 'the uneasy conscience and moral cowardice of an intellectual generation.' These publications established Judt as a historian whose ability to see the present in the past gave his work an unusual air of immediacy. Increasingly he inclined towards free-ranging inquiry across disciplines, pursuing a wide range of his interests reflected in the essay collection 'Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century' (2008).

Following teaching spells at Cambridge, Oxford and the University of California at Berkeley, Judt started his affiliation with New York University in 1987. It was there that Judt became the founding director of the Remarque Institute, where he promoted and shaped the historical study of Europe since 1995. Under his directorship, it became an important international centre for the study of Europe, past and present. He wrote nine books, mainly on the history of politics and ideas in Europe, and was a frequent writer of combative essays, reviews and op-ed pieces. His skepticism about the future of the European Union found expression in a sharply polemical, pamphlet-length book, 'A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe' (1996).

As a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Judt was known for his controversial writings about the Middle East. Never one to shy away from controversy, in 2003 Judt sparked a bitter debate when he argued that the Jewish state had become an 'anachronism' and he outlined a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem, proposing that Israel accept a future as a secular, bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.

Judt's career reached its zenith in 2005 with the publication of 'Post-war: A History of Europe Since 1945,' a hefty book that became a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Intellectual historian Louis Menand called Judt's scope 'virtually superhuman.' Yale historian, Timothy Snyder described it as 'the best book on its subject that will ever be written by anyone'. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic considered the tome a masterful account of Europe's recovery from the wreckage of World War II. In 2009, the Toronto Star called it the best historical book of the decade. It proclaimed, '"Postwar" was 'perhaps the most astonishing feat of synthesis ever achieved, as he (Judt) managed to weave every country and every major political and cultural trend into a seamless narrative.'

With the crushing news of his illness in 2008, which rendered him helpless and a quadriplegic within a few months of diagnosis, Judt contemplated euthanasia. 'There are times when I say to myself, this is so damn miserable I wish I was dead, in an objective sense of I wish I didn't have to get up this morning and do it all over again,' he remarked. 'I've thought about euthanasia a lot, not for tomorrow, but one has to plan for it because the likely trajectory is that you lose your capacity to express yourself long before you die.'

Despite his illness, Judt continued giving public lectures without the aid of notes, granting interviews and writing for the New York Review of Books. Words, for Judt, were a way of making sense of his life and a weapon in his battle against his illness. He believed, 'words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.'

In 1996, Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007, a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 2009, he was awarded a special Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement for his contribution to British Political writing.

In his final book, 'Ill Fares the Land', a passionate call for a re-engagement in politics, he reflected and wrote, 'Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest... The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.'

Shortly before his death Judt was described as having the 'liveliest mind in New York'. He died at his home in New York following complications from the disease, aged 62. He is survived by his third wife, dance critic Jennifer Homans and their two sons Nicholas and Daniel.

Tony Judt, historian; born London, 2 January 1948; married Jennifer Homans 1993, two sons, Nicholas and Daniel; died Manhatten, New York, 6 August 2010


Historian 'saw the big picture, but went to the heart of the matter'

By Jerome Taylor


Tony Judt: served for Israel in the Six-Day War but became a major critic of Israel and Zionism


Zionists, the Left, French post-war intellectuals and Marxists collectively lost one of their most acerbic critics over the weekend with the death of the British historian Tony Judt.

The 62-year-old academic died at his New York home after a prolonged and debilitating battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neurone disease which left an unimpaired and brilliant mind trapped inside a paralysed body for the last two years of his life.

The Jewish historian was born in east London but had lived in New York since 1987 where he continued to develop a reputation for being a ferocious critic of many political ideologies he had once fervently subscribed to.
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* Tony Judt: Celebrated academic and historian of modern Europe who remained eloquent in the face of devastating illness
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As a young man fired up by Marxism he became a kibbutz volunteer and went on to serve as a driver and translator for the Israeli Defence Forces during the Six-Day War before taking an ideological U-turn and becoming a major critic of both Marxism and Zionism. Although his critiques of Zionism only formed a small proportion of his academic output the subject often over-shadowed much of his other work. Five years before moving to the States in 1987, Judt wrote that Israel was a "belligerently intolerant, faith- driven ethno-state", incurring the wrath of vast swathes of Jewish and pro-Israeli intelligentsia. In 2003 he returned to the subject in an essay where he called on Israel to accept a "one-state solution" where Jews and Arabs could live peacefully in a secular country.

Among fellow historians, his 900-page 2005 opus Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 was regarded as one of the most sweeping and comprehensive attempts to sum up the post-Second World War period in a single volume.

"He had the unusual ability to see and convey the big picture while, at the same time, going to the heart of the matter," Mark Lilla, a history professor at Columbia University, told The New York Times. "Most academics do neither – they float in between. But Tony was able to talk about the big picture and explain why it matters now."

In an interview with The Independent earlier this year, Judt, wheelchair-bound and only able to speak with the aid of a microphone, described his condition.

"There's nothing saccharine about this; it's a crappy disease," he said. "It imprisons you, it turns you into a bundle of jelly, it's going to kill you sooner or later, and in a very unpleasant way, because it almost certainly strangulates you or chokes you. Having said that, I get satisfaction out of understanding what I'm going through, which I can only achieve by describing it with an almost externalised dispassion. It makes me feel like I'm not dead yet."

He was also bitterly critical of modern-day British politicians, who he described as being "political pygmies". This year's general election, he said, was a choice between a hollowed-out social democratic party and a Conservative Party which highlighted the "broken society" but couldn't admit that it was the legacy of Thatcherism that broke it.

"Neither side can directly speak to the depths of the problems they claim they would fix," he said. "Both are fraudulent."

Judt's final work, the short but polemical Ill Fares the Land, was an impassioned plea for the world to return to the values of social democracy, the centre-left political philosophy that had shaped so-much of Europe's thinking post-Second World War and enabled a continent to rebuild itself after five years of devastating conflict.

He described himself as a "universalist social democrat" with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world's sole superpower.
INDEPENDENT

Still irresistible, a working-class hero's finest speech

Jimmy Reid, the Clydeside trade union activist who died this week, was an inspiring orator. This speech, delivered on his inauguration as rector of Glasgow University in 1972, was compared at the time to the Gettysburg Address. It has lost little of its relevance

Friday, 13 August 2010

Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has, however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It's the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision-making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies.

Many may not have rationalised it. May not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it. It therefore conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation expresses itself in different ways in different people. It is to be found in what our courts often describe as the criminal antisocial behaviour of a section of the community. It is expressed by those young people who want to opt out of society, by drop-outs, the so-called maladjusted, those who seek to escape permanently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of course, it would be wrong to say it was the sole reason for these things. But it is a much greater factor in all of them than is generally recognised.

Society and its prevailing sense of values leads to another form of alienation. It alienates some from humanity. It partially de-humanises some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony is, they are often considered normal and well-adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than anyone else. They remind me of the character in the novel, Catch 22, the father of Major Major. He was a farmer in the American Mid-West. He hated suggestions for things like medi-care, social services, unemployment benefits or civil rights. He was, however, an enthusiast for the agricultural policies that paid farmers for not bringing their fields under cultivation. From the money he got for not growing alfalfa he bought more land in order not to grow alfalfa. He became rich. Pilgrims came from all over the state to sit at his feet and learn how to be a successful non-grower of alfalfa. His philosophy was simple. The poor didn't work hard enough and so they were poor. He believed that the good Lord gave him two strong hands to grab as much as he could for himself. He is a comic figure. But think – have you not met his like here in Britain? Here in Scotland? I have.

It is easy and tempting to hate such people. However, it is wrong. They are as much products of society, and of a consequence of that society, human alienation, as the poor drop-out. They are losers. They have lost the essential elements of our common humanity. Man is a social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women. The big challenge to our civilisation is not Oz, a magazine I haven't seen, let alone read. Nor is it permissiveness, although I agree our society is too permissive. Any society which, for example, permits over one million people to be unemployed is far too permissive for my liking. Nor is it moral laxity in the narrow sense that this word is generally employed – although in a sense here we come nearer to the problem. It does involve morality, ethics, and our concept of human values. The challenge we face is that of rooting out anything and everything that distorts and devalues human relations.

Let me give two examples from contemporary experience to illustrate the point.

Recently on television I saw an advert. The scene is a banquet. A gentleman is on his feet proposing a toast. His speech is full of phrases like "this full-bodied specimen". Sitting beside him is a young, buxom woman. The image she projects is not pompous but foolish. She is visibly preening herself, believing that she is the object of the bloke's eulogy. Then he concludes – "and now I give...", then a brand name of what used to be described as Empire sherry. Then the laughter. Derisive and cruel laughter. The real point, of course, is this. In this charade, the viewers were obviously expected to identify not with the victim but with her tormentors.

The other illustration is the widespread, implicit acceptance of the concept and term "the rat race". The picture it conjures up is one where we are scurrying around scrambling for position, trampling on others, back-stabbing, all in pursuit of personal success. Even genuinely intended, friendly advice can sometimes take the form of someone saying to you, "Listen, you look after number one." Or as they say in London, "Bang the bell, Jack, I'm on the bus."

To the students [of Glasgow University] I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?"

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society. The power structures that have inevitably emerged from this approach threaten and undermine our hard-won democratic rights. The whole process is towards the centralisation and concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. The facts are there for all who want to see. Giant monopoly companies and consortia dominate almost every branch of our economy. The men who wield effective control within these giants exercise a power over their fellow men which is frightening and is a negation of democracy.

Government by the people for the people becomes meaningless unless it includes major economic decision-making by the people for the people. This is not simply an economic matter. In essence it is an ethical and moral question, for whoever takes the important economic decisions in society ipso facto determines the social priorities of that society.

From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books. To appreciate fully the inhumanity of this situation, you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man suddenly told he is redundant, without provision made for suitable alternative employment, with the prospect in the West of Scotland, if he is in his late forties or fifties, of spending the rest of his life in the Labour Exchange. Someone, somewhere has decided he is unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.

The concentration of power in the economic field is matched by the centralisation of decision-making in the political institutions of society. The power of Parliament has undoubtedly been eroded over past decades, with more and more authority being invested in the Executive. The power of local authorities has been and is being systematically undermined. The only justification I can see for local government is as a counter- balance to the centralised character of national government.

Local government is to be restructured. What an opportunity, one would think, for de-centralising as much power as possible back to the local communities. Instead, the proposals are for centralising local government. It's once again a blue-print for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented, in a few years when asked "Where do you come from?" I can reply: "The Western Region." It even sounds like a hospital board.

It stretches from Oban to Girvan and eastwards to include most of the Glasgow conurbation. As in other matters, I must ask the politicians who favour these proposals – where and how in your calculations did you quantify the value of a community? Of community life? Of a sense of belonging? Of the feeling of identification? These are rhetorical questions. I know the answer. Such human considerations do not feature in their thought processes.

Everything that is proposed from the establishment seems almost calculated to minimise the role of the people, to miniaturise man. I can understand how attractive this prospect must be to those at the top. Those of us who refuse to be pawns in their power game can be picked up by their bureaucratic tweezers and dropped in a filing cabinet under "M" for malcontent or maladjusted. When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet.

If modern technology requires greater and larger productive units, let's make our wealth-producing resources and potential subject to public control and to social accountability. Let's gear our society to social need, not personal greed. Given such creative re-orientation of society, there is no doubt in my mind that in a few years we could eradicate in our country the scourge of poverty, the underprivileged, slums, and insecurity.

Even this is not enough. To measure social progress purely by material advance is not enough. Our aim must be the enrichment of the whole quality of life. It requires a social and cultural, or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country. A necessary part of this must be the restructuring of the institutions of government and, where necessary, the evolution of additional structures so as to involve the people in the decision-making processes of our society. The so-called experts will tell you that this would be cumbersome or marginally inefficient. I am prepared to sacrifice a margin of efficiency for the value of the people's participation. Anyway, in the longer term, I reject this argument.

To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people. I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It's a social crime. The flowering of each individual's personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone's development.

In this context education has a vital role to play. If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with a full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change. The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with and in service to our fellow human beings, can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.

Universities must be in the forefront of development, must meet social needs and not lag behind them. It is my earnest desire that this great University of Glasgow should be in the vanguard, initiating changes and setting the example for others to follow. Part of our educational process must be the involvement of all sections of the university on the governing bodies. The case for student representation is unanswerable. It is inevitable.

My conclusion is to re-affirm what I hope and certainly intend to be the spirit permeating this address. It's an affirmation of faith in humanity. All that is good in man's heritage involves recognition of our common humanity, an unashamed acknowledgement that man is good by nature. Burns expressed it in a poem that technically was not his best, yet captured the spirit. In "Why should we idly waste our prime...":

"The golden age, we'll then revive, each man shall be a brother,

In harmony we all shall live and till the earth together,

In virtue trained, enlightened youth shall move each fellow creature,

And time shall surely prove the truth that man is good by nature."

It's my belief that all the factors to make a practical reality of such a world are maturing now. I would like to think that our generation took mankind some way along the road towards this goal. It's a goal worth fighting for.

Reproduced with permission from the archive of the University of Glasgow

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