Very sorry to see that Bronisław Geremek has died in a car crash in his native Poland. He was a tremendously impressive figure; I had the pleasure of dealing with him a bit when I worked for ICG, as he was on the board, and for an elder statesman with his tremendous career history he was always very approachable. He was 76, but still vigorous.

When I saw Frank at P-Con a few months ago, I complimented him (sincerely) on how well he was looking, and said that I was very glad to see him there. He chuckled in that way he had, and said that he expected to be around for a while yet. Well, he was wrong; but we will remember him for more than just "a while".

Kudos to purple_pen, who for the first few months of this year was publishing as a blog the daily entries of the diary of her ancestor, mid-nineteenth century Birmingham surgeon James Fraser West, on LJ as jamesfraserwest. It did not run for very long - his medical work was interrupted by a long trip to Italy for the sake of his health; this did not have the desired effect, and the blog has now ended with his obituary.

I found it fascinating to get to know this long-departed doctor, and his death came as a real shock - we knew he was ill, but he wasn't letting on how bad it was in his diary. (Though I think he was too good a doctor not to have known.) purple_pen's mother, Geraldine Goodman, has published it as part of a longer biography (A Victorian Surgeon, from Brewin Books): I shall look out for it, not least because my mother-in-law's maiden name happened to be West and she too was a doctor based in the Birmingham area before she retired. Thanks again, purple_pen and your mother; it's been an interesting journey.

Last week was insanely busy for me, and I've only just caught up with the news of the death of Richard Holme eight days ago, aged 71. I first knew of him in my early activist days as a student immediately after the SDP/Liberal merger, when diehard Liberals excoriated him as the demon prince of selling out to ex-Labour and later New Labour; his acceptance of a peerage rather than fight the winnable seat of Cheltenham threw activists there into a mild spin as well (if I remember rightly, the two candidates to replace him were the future MP Nigel Jones and his ex-wife, or something like that).

But when I actually got to know him, through my involvement in the Lib Dems Northern Ireland policy working group after I had moved back to Belfast, I found myself really impressed by his gravitas and also his humour. As the party's Northern Ireland spokesman, and in the House of Lords to boot, he was a bit invisible to the public eye (I shouldn't think many people reading this had ever heard of him), but was very active behind the scenes. He sent me a congratulatory note after I captained the QUB team on University Challenge, but mocked my election literature - "Couldn't you have found a photograph to use which was taken after your fourteenth birthday?"

Once I moved to the Balkans we lost touch - I was sorry to see the circumstances of his parting company with the Broadcasting Standards Council, but glad to get back in touch with him briefly a couple of years ago. Nice tribute to him by Paddy Ashdown in the Independent and by Trevor Smith and others in the Guardian.

Various sources are reporting the death of Johnny Byrne, who wrote much of the hit series All Creatures Great and Small (based on the pseudonymous reminiscences of Yorkshire vet "James Herriot", and starring among others a youthful Peter Davison) and also wrote three Doctor Who stories, The Keeper of Traken, Arc of Infinity and Warriors of the Deep (two of which also starred an only slightly less youthful Peter Davison).

Mercifully, few Who fans will be aware of Byrne's peculiar participation on Usenet newsgroups discussing the break-up of Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s. He was determined to demonstrate the evils of the 1941-45 Croatian regime, which were indeed manifest and horrible, but went too far in appearing to argue that the deeds of the Croats fifty years before excused or exonerated the activities of the Serbs in the more recent conflict. The archives are all there on Google; but they basically demonstrate that he was more successful when writing his own fiction than when trying to peddle other people's.

Came home last night to find the internet on the blink, so went to bed early and missed the news that everyone has been blogging about. Well, he created our world in so many ways: I loved his early short stories, I loved his mid-period novels, and I forgave the later collaborations. Sometimes his wit could baffle translators, but his compassionate vision of the future of humanity was always clear. This evening I will have another listen to the Radio 4 documentary from a few years back.

Like a lot of Who fans, I was sorry to learn of the death of Kevin Stoney who played both of the two greatest villains of the show before the arrival of Davros - Mavic Chen in The Daleks' Master Plan, and Tobias Vaughn in The Invasion; and I watched him just the other week in Revenge of the Cybermen. Alex Wilcock has written a brilliant tribute to him here. those of you who have spotted my activites in certain Doctor Who-related communities on Livejournal will be aware that I have already paid him a special tribute.

Like many other people, I'm sorry to hear of the death of Verity Lambert yesterday, the day before the 44th anniversary of Doctor Who and the week before her own 72nd birthday. Not many people start a cult TV series before they turn 28. Her professional record was indeed impressive, but I found myself really charmed by her commentaries on the DVDs of early Doctor Who stories, and by a lovely double-headed interview she did with Russell T Davies in one of last year's Doctor Who magazines. Her legacy, of course, lives on.

Today is an official day of mourning in Macedonia: their great singer Toše Proeski was killed in a car accident in Croatia yesterday. I saw him perform at a Macedonian cultural/diplomatic event in 2005, an event I described here; he was very good, and everyone I talked to from Macedonia has taken his death very hard. He was only 26.

I see that the prime minister of Armenia has died suddenly. I had lunch with him (or rather was in attendance at a lunch with my then boss) in 2004. Not quite as dramatically as his predecessor in 1999, or the prime minister of neighbouring Georgia in 2005, but still rather a shock to the political system. Armenia is one of those oddities, a multi-party system with distinctly authoritarian tendencies. President Kocharian is due to stand down next year, and his hand-picked successor, the current defence minister Sarkisian, is giving a talk in Brussels next week. I think I may go to that, if it is still on.

There were a substantial cohort of political activists in Northern Ireland whose initial burst of public activity coincided with the peace process in the mid-1990s. I was one of the least prominent (and least successful) among them; David Ervine was one of the most prominent. He is, I think, the first of that cohort to have died.

I have to get up early tomorrow morning to get the train to London, and he deserves a longer tribute than this. But I'll just record for now that I always found him congenial, sincere, and straightforward in our relatively few mutual dealings. I think the last time we met was in a TV studio before the 2003 elections, where I correctly assured him that his own Assembly seat was reasonably safe but his colleague in North Belfast might have a more difficult task.

His time, to be honest, had passed. He was unable to really engage the UVF in the decommissioning process; he was unable to keep the Loyalist electorate engaged in his political project. I had already predicted on my website that he was likely to lose his East Belfast assembly seat to the DUP in the event of elections this year, and I think that that DUP gain must now be a near-certainty.

But I would have liked to see him sit around the TV studios for the next twenty years in graceful (or graceless) retirement as a pundit, puffing on his pipe and continuing to expound mercilessly on the topic of why those who voted for the other Unionist parties were voting against their own self-interest. We won't see that now.

applez alerts me to the sad news that Gerald Ford has died, aged 93 years, and a month more than Ronald Reagan was when he died a few years back. Ford was the oldest ex-President of the United States ever, and the oldest living ex-Vice-President. George Bush senior, born four months before Jimmy Carter in 1924 (and three and a half years before Walter Mondale), now becomes the oldest former holder of both offices.

Ford was the first president whose term I remember in full (I was not yet two years old when Nixon was elected). It's a scary thought that the kids who were born the year he lost the election to Jimmy Carter have now turned thirty. I am instinctively leftish of the political spectrum, but I retain a soft spot for Ford. He clearly was a more pleasant person than the average Republican candidate - it oozes out of this 1976 campaign commercial - but more importantly, his intervention in the Helsinki Accords process in 1975 made a greater contribution to bringing about the end of the Cold War through the peaceful implosion of Communism than any of Reagan's adventurist efforts. Any of us living in a peaceful Europe today - especially in Eastern Europe - owe him a huge debt.

Having said that, although as a nine-year-old I cheered for Ford, the one I had heard of, against Carter, the one I hadn't heard of, I would certainly cheer the other way now. But alas, as of yesterday, we have only Carter left to cheer for.

Trivia point: Ford was the only President since Herbert Hoover not to feature as Time Magazine's Person of the Year during his term of office. He was also, however, the only President to have featured on the cover of Cosmopolitan as a male model.

ETA counslr_tragedy alerts me to a piece on Ford's progressive position on gay rights.

My first day off work since I finished at the old job has been a tiring one.

Turkmenbashi dead!

(Hat-tip alexmc)

Probably those of you who knew him will have already heard the sad news. His most recent blog entries didn't give much cause for optimism, but I guess we all hoped he would pull through. I last saw him in Dublin in March, when crazysoph persuaded the hospital to let him out for the afternoon; and a month later he very kindly emailed me some pages from a military history book he was reading which mentioned some of my ancestors, though I narrowly missed him in Brussels in May. He'll be sadly missed.

Today is the 1910th anniversary of the assassination of the Roman emperor Domitian. Intrigued by the astrological features of this event, I wrote a short article about it a while back, and then found someone else had written a longer one. Not that I believe in any of it myself, but Domitian obviously did, and ended up dead as a result. (Some would argue that the real moral is that he should have stayed in bed all morning. I leave it to you to decide.)

I have a bit of an obsession with people who have certain things in common with me, like my exact date of birth, for instance, or shared interests via livejournal.

One sub-set of this obsession is with people who share my name. This includes a number of ancestors, going back to Sir Nicholas Whyte aka White, who lived c.1532-1592 (and died a prisoner in the Tower of London). I have mentioned a couple of others here before - a 19th-century New York architect and the president of the Huron County Federation of Agriculture.

Of course, I have a Google alert set up for my own name, and variations of it (including "Nick Whyte", which I never use myself), which is where I got the reference to the Huron farmers' spokesman. I would estimate that 95% of the alerts I get are about me, often flagging up interviews I had forgotten giving (indeed, in one recent case it was an interview I hadn't given - they used stock footage of me from an interview last year and pretended it was current).

Over the last couple of days, it's been a little different. Nicholas Whyte, the bright son of Jamaican immigrants to Brooklyn, joined the US marines and was killed by a sniper in Iraq on 21 June, two days before his 22nd burthday; his funeral was yesterday. It is a bit odd to read an obituary with one's own name on (see here and here). From there it is a simple jump to his myspace profile, where his goal for this year, sadly unachieved, was to "stay alive". His myspace blog has been updated with details of his wake and funeral, and of a scholarship fund in his memory. I may send them a donation.

The BBC is reporting that Charles Haughey has died.

Like him or loathe him (and I certainly loathed him), he was one of the most significant and symbolic figures of Irish politics from the 1960s to the 1990s.

More later, perhaps.

A plausible character, I thought. But obviously not plausible enough. Always more than a little alarming when this happens to people one has actually met.

Along with everyone else, I am dismayed and saddened by the news of Octavia Butler's death. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a brilliant obituary. (Hat-tip to Bookslut.)

Baba Tahir Emini, head of the Bektashi community in Tetovo, Macedonia, has died of a sudden heart attack. He was among the most progressive Muslim leaders in the world. I met him (for the second time) back in August last year.

It's especially sad to lose him at a time when dialogue between Islam and the West could have done with a few more positive messages. (Though the Balkans have not been a particular problem in this respect.)

Seems a bit grim to have put obituaries up so often recently, but I just wanted to note the passing of Matti Wuori, former MEP, and adviser of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He helped me out a bit on Montenegro once, and I had a good chat with him in 2002. He looked pretty ill then, and I would have put his age at ten years older than he really was.

I got to wondering the other day, as yet another news item about avian flu was on the radio, how come we don't hear so much about the celebrity victims of the 1918 flu pandemic? I mean, we can all name numerous victims of AIDS at the drop of a hat, from Isaac Asimov to Freddie Mercury.

So, to follow up my ground-breaking research on government officials killed when their own cannons blew up, here is a list of more or less famous people who did die in the great pandemic. I confess I had heard of only one of them, Egon Schiele, but the others all seem respectable enough. (Noticeable how young most of them were - the bug hit the 20-40 age range particularly hard.)

I've added most of them to the relevant Wikipedia entry, except the two Tongan ladies about whom more research is needed.

• Guillaume Apollinaire, French surrealist poet.
• Felix Arndt, American composer.
• Randolph Bourne, American political thinker</a>.
• Anton Dilger, ironically in charge of German biological warfare in the first world war.
• Henry G. Ginaca, American inventor.
• Myrtle Gonzalez, American actress.
• Hans E. Lau, Danish astronomer.
• Harold Lockwood, American actor.
• Edmond Rostand, French poet and dramatist.
• Egon Schiele, Austrian artist.
• Reggie Schwarz, South African cricketer.
• Queen 'Anaseini Takipo, third wife of King George Tupou II of Tonga.
• Tupou Moheofo Tupou, mistress of King George Tupou II of Tonga.
• William Walker, British diver.
• King Watzke, New Orleans bandleader.

There, that feels enlightening!

[Edited to add: Hah, I see the editors of the German version already had the same idea. I can nick some of their names then.]

Occasionally one picks up stuff by Googling old friends and acquaintances which is not very welcome news. Peter Whaley was the first US diplomat to be posted full-time to Banja Luka in Bosnia in early 1998, after I'd been there for a year myself. (They'd had a succession of people parachuted in for a month or so at a time; he was supposed to be staying there long-term.) We clicked at once, and I found him a really helpful mentor in the minefield of international politics. He didn't describe himself as a career diplomat, but as a failed novelist who had gone into foreign relations as an alternative; yet at the same time, by taking me and my work seriously, helped me to realise that I had become an expert in Balkan politics with marketable skills.

He was a very modest guy, never mentioning his role in attempting to prevent the Rwanda genocide, though occasionally railing against the stupidities of US foreign policy (it being Bosnia in 1998, his unorthodox views on refugee return - proved spectularly right in Zaire - were frequently aired; also his opinion of President Aristide of Haiti was very much lower than is stated in his obituary). I only saw him really annoyed once, when a particularly juicy piece of political gossip flowed from me to my Sarajevo colleague to the US embassy in Sarajevo, unfortunately bypassing him en route. He raced furiously into my office (down three flights of stairs, across the road and then up another flight) to demand the details from me in person. We sorted it out over a beer, though (and anyway it turned out in the end that the story wasn't true).

I understand that he left Bosnia not long after I did, and parted company with the State Department shortly after that; I never got back in touch with him, and to be honest probably wouldn't have got around to it quickly. But it's sad news, if old news by now, and I'm sorry that he never got the chance to write his novel.

The Russian way.

srk1 kindly asked my views on Ted Heath. I'll just start by noting that the number of living ex-prime ministers has halved this year, from four to two; and I wouldn't be surprised if it were to halve again before it increases.

On Northern Ireland, the picture is mixed. The gross security errors of Bloody Sunday, internment and the Falls Road curfew, crucial iconic incidents in poisoning the relationship between the British Army and many Catholics, all of which directly strengthened the Provisionals, all took place earlier in his term of office, and Heath must carry ultimate responsibility for all three (including internment, technically Faulkner's decision but one that could hardly have been taken without Heath's knowledge or consent). Suspending Stormont was obviously the right thing to do - but perhaps this should have happened much sooner. And Heath then further bolstered the legitimacy of the Republican movement by flying in Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams (as spokesmen for the IRA, note, not Sinn Fein) for the famous London talks with Willie Whitelaw.

On the other hand, Sunningdale was indeed an accomplishment - an agreement in many ways less flawed than the 1998 one (voluntary coalition rather than forced, largely brokered by Heath himself, and essentially wrecked by Harold Wilson's failure to stand up to Loyalist intimidation. Some analysts blame Heath for calling the first 1974 election early, and handing the Loyalists the propaganda coup of winning 11 out of 12 Northern Ireland seats. I would defend him on this - the election was coming at some point anyway, and in those days Westminster elections were practically second-order elections in Northern Ireland. It should also be said that the whole Sunningdale process, from the suspension of Stormont in early 1972 to the inauguration of the power-sharing executive in 1974, took less time than even the 1996-98 Mitchell talks, let alone the entire process from Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 to the present day.

I don't write much here about Northern Irish politics, but two sites which I do scan from time to time are the Slugger O'Toole weblog, providing commentary from a number of different perspectives, and The Blanket, which also presents a diversity of views, but is essentially run by disgruntled Republicans who believe that Gerry Adams has essentially settled for the same deal that was on offer in 1974, and complain that this devalues the entire armed struggle since then. I'd put it a little differently; I agree that Gerry Adams has indeed essentially settled for the same deal that was on offer in 1974 (strictly, 1973), but would say this demonstrates the worthlessness of the entire armed struggle since then.

Going back to Heath, two last notes. First off, last night's TV documentary showed how important he was in getting the UK into the European Economic Community as then was (and didn't mention Northern Ireland once). This is probably his most valuable political legacy, and he deserves a great deal of credit for it. Second, a friend of mine stood against him in Old Bexley and Sidcup in his last election, in 1997. The national papers ran a feature on the largest age gap between any two candidates in the same constituency - 54 years: Heath was then 80, while Iain had been born in the week of decimalisation, when Heath had already been prime minister for six months. Heath won handsomely, of course, but for the last time.

[Edited to add] Journalistic assessment from Belfast Telegraph here. Key phrase, "the Sunningdale settlement turned out like so much of the Heath record, to be either a glorious failure or too much too soon".

Sorry to see via East Ethnia that Perica Vučinić died last week, aged only 46. I remember him launching his magazine Reporter/Репортер in Banja Luka back in 1997 when I was living there; it was soon the best independent source for news analysis in the entire Serbian cultural space (though as this was at the peak of Milosevic's power, this is not saying very much). Although these are easier days, it's still one of the leading media sources in the region. I don't think I ever met him (and have certainly no idea what caused his early death), but I just wanted to acknowledge his contribution and his courage in opening up the space for political discourse under the peculiar circumstances of Bosnia and Serbia in the late 1990s.

A real blast from the past, as Doctor Who finishes and immediately the news comes on to tell us that Jim Callaghan has died...

Sad news. As well as F&LiLV, I particularly liked his accounts of the 1972 and 1992 presidential elections.

In many languages from the BBC:

( font porn )

Not surprisingly the BBC is not carrying this in most of the African languages, or indeed in many of the Asian languages.