Danielle Mitterrand (RIP)

Agota Kristof (RIP)

The Queen Of Camden

Lucian Freud (RIP)

JM Bordaberry Arocena (RIP)

Otto von Habsburg (RIP)

Otto von Habsburg, who has died aged 98, bore the oldest and most eminent dynastic name in European history and could, according to genealogists, trace his ancestry back to the sixth century. The pretender to the defunct thrones of Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), he pursued a democratic postwar career as a member of the European parliament and a fervent advocate of European union.

Spending time in German diplomatic and political circles, as I once did as a correspondent, you meet men who introduce themselves in the formal German manner – a brief bow from the shoulders followed by an unadorned name straight out of Germanic history. But I never quite got used to shaking hands with a stranger who flatly introduced himself as "Bismarck" (diplomat), "Hannover" (banker) or "Rommel" (mayor of Stuttgart). Or indeed "Habsburg", whom I met briefly at a party conference in Munich.

Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius von Habsburg was born at Reichenau an der Rax, Lower Austria. His father, Charles, would become Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Otto's mother was Zita of Bourbon-Parma. His great-uncle, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in 1914 would trigger the first world war, stood in for Otto's ancient godfather, the Emperor Franz Joseph, at his christening. Otto's father succeeded Franz Joseph in 1916, whereupon Otto became crown prince.

Otto von Bismarck had excluded Austria-Hungary from his united Germany of 1871 because of its large and diffuse non-German population. After 1918, it duly broke up into independent states including Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The rump of ethnically German Austria became a republic too. Charles went into exile with his family that year, and they later moved to the Basque country, Belgium and France. In 1919 Austria finally dispossessed the Habsburgs, although they kept their private fortune. Charles died in Madeira in 1922, whereupon Otto became head of the house of Habsburg, the titular Duke of Lorraine and pretender to four thrones, at the age of nine.

Noble titles confer no status or privilege in the four republics of which Habsburg held citizenship, but while Germany – where he spent most of his later life – tolerates their use, in Austria they are banned by law. So in the country of his birth, the eldest son of the last emperor of Austria was officially styled Otto Habsburg-Lothringen (Lorraine) – even the simple aristocratic prefix "von" was outlawed. Habsburg, always a loyal Catholic working for better understanding among Christians, Jews and Muslims, went to the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, to read politics and social studies. He graduated in 1935.

Still believing in his right to the throne, Habsburg as an Austrian patriot opposed the country's absorption by Hitler into the Third Reich in 1938, and was sentenced to death by the Nazis. He fled France with his mother to neutral Portugal and then Washington DC in 1940, just before the Germans took Paris. After the war, Habsburg spent several years in France and Spain.

In May 1961, he formally renounced his claim to the Austrian throne and announced that he was a loyal citizen of the republic. As a result, two years later, an Austrian court lifted the ban on his visiting the land of his birth – a decision that proved unpopular in some quarters, precipitating the "Habsburg crisis" in Austrian politics. He was allowed to cross the border in 1966. Towards the end of his life, he admitted that his heart had not been in the renunciation, which he made out of sheer pragmatism.

Taking up residence in Germany, whose citizenship Habsburg also held, he joined the Christian Social Union (CSU), the rightwing Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democratic Union party (CDU), active in the rest of Germany. He was elected to the European parliament for the CSU and sat for 20 years from 1979 as MEP for Bavaria, becoming the equivalent of "father of the house" as the oldest member. He was already president of the international Pan-Europa Union from 1973, retiring only in 2004, strongly favouring political union and the eastward expansion of the EU to countries once ruled by his ancestors. In 1988, Habsburg clashed with the Rev Ian Paisley, then an MEP, after Paisley called the visiting Pope John Paul II the antichrist. A year later Habsburg helped to organise the "pan-European picnic" on the Austrian-Hungarian border in the summer of 1989, one of the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism.

He married the German Princess Regina of Saxe-Meiningen in 1951; she died in 2010. They lived near Lake Starnberg in Bavaria and had five daughters and two sons, who survive him. The eldest son, Karl, becomes head of the house of Habsburg.

Jim Morrison, 40 Years

Arthur Goldreich (RIP)

In the midst of one of the tensest periods of the anti-apartheid struggle, a single-winged Cessna aircraft carrying two priests in dog collars took off from an airstrip in Swaziland and flew across South African territory to British Bechuanaland. The "clerics" stepped out to a rapturous welcome from the local African National Congress. The escape of the freedom fighter Arthur Goldreich while on remand in a Johannesburg prison had been accomplished.

Goldreich, who has died aged 81, was part of the underground leadership of the ANC's liberation army, Spear of the Nation, that was captured in a police raid on Liliesleaf farm, Rivonia, in July 1963. Goldreich was the tenant of the property and had been living a seemingly harmless existence with his teacher wife, Hazel, and two sons, Nicholas and Paul – horse riding in the countryside and holding a job as a designer for a Johannesburg department store. (He designed the sets for King Kong, the black musical that played in London in the early 1960s.) So integrated were the Goldreich family in the secret life of the farm that on one occasion, as the high command met to discuss tactics, five-year-old Paul was found crawling around under the table.

Living at the farm, too, in the early 1960s was "David", purportedly a domestic servant but otherwise known as Nelson Mandela, the guerrilla commander-in-chief. Mandela discussed tactics with Goldreich, explaining in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), that "Arthur had fought with the Palmach, the military wing of the Jewish National Movement in Palestine. He was knowledgable about guerrilla warfare and helped fill in many gaps in my understanding."

Mandela was already in prison by the time the raid on the farm took place, but was brought back to court and put on trial alongside others arrested that day. The following year, at the conclusion of what became known as the Rivonia trial, he and seven other defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Goldreich was born in Johannesburg, the son of a furniture dealer. The family moved to Pietersburg (now Polokwane) in the northern Transvaal. At his Afrikaans school, his German language teacher gave out Hitler Youth magazines for the class to read. Arthur wrote to the pro-British prime minister, Jan Smuts, demanding to be taught Hebrew. The wish was granted.

On leaving school, he enrolled as an architectural student in Johannesburg, but as a dedicated Zionist he gave up his studies in 1948 to fight in Israel's war of independence. The war coincided with the Afrikaner nationalist victory in the South African general election. Goldreich later said that he was driven by "the Holocaust and the struggle against British colonialism, but the Nats winning the election left me in no doubt about what I had to do".

He left Israel to study industrial design in London before returning home. He had married Hazel Berman, who was active in the Young Communist League. Goldreich, though still preoccupied with Zionism, was moving to the left, and joined the underground Communist party. As the ANC prepared to launch its armed struggle, the Goldreichs were persuaded to rent Liliesleaf as the headquarters of its high command. Goldreich was the ideal cover. "A flamboyant person," Mandela said of him, "he gave the farm a buoyant atmosphere."

After the police raid, the Goldreichs were held under the 90-day law at Marshall Square, Johannesburg's main police station, but discipline there was surprisingly lax. One day Johan Greeff, a teenaged policeman with no idea of the importance of his charges, was switched to overseeing the "political" cells. The detainees found him obliging. He would collect food and cigarettes, and on one occasion a pair of shoes and a new suit. Goldreich even persuaded the station commander to allow him out of the building, accompanied by Greeff, to visit his barber. "Arthur could charm the birds out of the trees," Hazel says, "and Greeff was easy meat."

Greeff was interested in fast cars, and had his eye on a Studebaker Lark. He agreed to facilitate their escape for 4,000 rand (then £2,000) in cash. One quiet Saturday night, he opened the inner and outer doors, then faked an injury. Goldreich and a civil rights lawyer, Harold Wolpe, made good their escape and, despite a furious nationwide manhunt, were smuggled into Swaziland, where they lay low in the home of a sympathetic Anglican priest before setting out for London.

Goldreich returned to Israel, becoming a professor at the Bezalel academy of arts and design, part of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He later spoke out firmly against the brutality and inhumanity imposed on the people of occupied Palestine. Hazel was released after three months, having refused to join the escapees because of concerns about her children. The couple later divorced and Goldreich remarried.

Greeff did not fare as well. He was arrested within the hour, before he was able to collect the bundle of notes from a go-between, Paul Joseph. He was sentenced to six years in prison, paroled after serving two years. Thirty years later, with apartheid ended, Joseph raised the matter of his payment. The escapees, as well as the ANC, said the debt should be settled. Goldreich said Greeff was "a kind man and paid a severe price. We owe him a lot." More than 40 years after the debt was incurred, it was at last settled when a courier arrived at Greeff's motor repair shop in the remote northern Cape to deliver an amount believed to be in the region of SAR110,000 (£10,000).

Elaine Stewart (RIP)

Lidia Gueiler (RIP)

Severiano Bellesteros (RIP)

Osama Bin Laden (RIP)

Ernesto Sabato (RIP)

Erhard Loretan (RIP)

The Cuckoo (To A)

He heard the first cukoo at the beginning of April.

Because he'd been feeling on edge, maybe,

from his inclination to order the chaos, maybe,

he wanted to know which notes the cukoo sang.

He sat waiting with his pitch pipe

next afternoon: when

would the cukoo sing?

He finally achieved it;

The pitch pipe told no lies.

Si-sol were the cukoo's notes.

The discovery shook the countryside.

Everyone wanted to prove whether truly those

were the notes that the cukoo sang.

The measurements were not in harmony.

Each had his or her own truth.

One said it was fa-re, another mi-do.

No one managed to agree.

Meanwhile the cukoo went on singing in the forest,

not mi-do, not fa-re, not si-sol, either.

As it had a thousand years before,

the cukoo sang cuccu, cuccu.

Liz Taylor (RIP)

Jane Russell (RIP)

Santi Santamaria (RIP)

THE best restaurant in the world, according to many of those who passionately rate these things, sits on the Costa Brava at Roses, 160km north of Barcelona. There, at Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli (three Michelin stars), you will find mosaics of sea anemones, and parmesan-infused air; spherified olives, with their concentrated essence minutely encased in gelatin; a tortilla española deconstructed into tiny layers of egg-white sabayon, onion purée and potato foam, served in a sherry glass; and a dessert called “Autumn”, where sweet and spicy powders make up a forest floor that is strewn with chocolate leaves.

An hour’s drive south, at a restaurant called Can Fabes (also three Michelin stars), Santi Santamaría knew just what he thought of such tinkerings. Mr Adrià and his followers, he announced in 2007, were a gang of frauds. By footling round with centrifuges and liquid nitrogen they were reducing food to a set of mental hurdles, as though there weren’t already enough traffic lights and zebra crossings in life. These were meals they would never dream of eating themselves, full of methyl cellulose and emulsifiers that might well poison their customers. No wonder Mr Adrià was stylishly slim where Mr Santamaría, white chef’s jacket stretched to bursting point as he rose monumentally from his chair to berate his rival in public, was not.

At his restaurant, he was quick to point out, the food was pure, unadulterated, and looked like what it was. Roast kid done so perfectly, lacquered and stuffed, with a simple jus, that it had stayed on the menu for years. Bean soup with black pudding and bacon, beignets oozing warm chocolate truffle across the plate. “Autumn” at Mr Santamaría’s establishment meant the earth-smell of mushrooms fresh-picked in the woods, damp-feathered game pulled from the huntsman’s pouch, and lentil stew so rich, so redolent of the season, that as the lid of the tureen was lifted Mr Santamaría’s hands would start to rotate sedately, wafting the aroma upwards, and his eyes to close with sheer rapture.

He knew about science. He’d had his fill of it as a young man, trying to be a technical draughtsman and then a quantity surveyor, when all he had wanted to do was stay in his mother’s kitchen cooking, and then eating, macaroni with sofrito and sausages, or her special filled pancakes. The day in 1981 when he put down the set square and put on the apron, having decided to turn that ancient, tumbledown family kitchen into a restaurant, was the happiest of his life—not forgetting the day of his marriage to his teenage sweetheart Àngels, who tied on her apron beside him.

Science, he admitted, was good for some things: to keep fish stream-fresh, to clarify a consommé. But he was on the craftsman’s side. An artist was what he had really wanted to be, and he had simply transferred his painterly feelings to stroking the rich glaze on a shank of lamb, or dashing his signature in a passion-fruit coulis. The menu changed with his moods as much as the season: red peppers because they had shone at the morning market, sardines for their feel in his plump fingers, the first wild asparagus simply because it was there, and had to be celebrated with his customers. His life was loudly dedicated to taste, real taste, and lingering pleasure for all the senses, not simply some brief, show-off spectacle achieved with stabilisers and steam.

As a young chef, self-taught, he had devoured cookery books of every kind: medieval, Japanese, Italian, all the French masters. Nouvelle cuisine especially impressed him. But he kept returning to the flavours and products of his beloved Catalonia, and even to the small, rocky stretch of it outside his kitchen door. His baby lamb came from his own Montseny mountains, and was flavoured with herbs that grew there. Fish came from Blanes, the first spring peas from Llavaneres, artichokes from El Prat de Llobregat. His enthusiastic immersion as a boy in Catalan culture—speaking, reading and writing a language that was officially banished under Franco to the hearth and home, wandering in the rugged, piny Catalan landscape—reached its natural apogee in preserving, lovingly, what Catalunya tasted like. It was fitting that the last meal he made, before he died of a heart attack at his new restaurant in distant Singapore, was a pa amb tomàquet, fresh tomato pulp and olive oil pressed onto bread, the purest taste of home.

A table as a poem

By then a truce had been reached with Mr Adrià, though it was fidgety. The slimmer man dismissed Mr Santamaría’s barbs as total nonsense, and their originator as a staid old conservative. But Mr Santamaría did not greatly mind that, if it meant that he was honouring the best traditions of cooking and thereby contributing, as he saw it, to the beauty of life.

A table at Can Fabes—or any of his six other restaurants—was, in his words, “a poem”. It stirred memories of his mother spreading out the special white cloth she used for feasts. In this calm, unhurried setting Mr Santamaría, using only fire, would perform the “magic” of turning raw food into meals. The result could be shrimp “that makes you lose your senses”, or a fish and potato soup that would “put the moon on your plate”. And nothing could taste better, surely, for all those gizmos, at the best restaurant in the world.

Daniel Bell (RIP)

ASKED what he specialised in, Daniel Bell replied: “generalisations”. Mr Bell lived a varied life. He grew up in New York City, so poor that he sometimes had to scavenge for food. Yet he ended his days in bourgeois comfort in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He spent 20 years as a journalist, mostly as Fortune’s labour editor, before decamping to academia. His boss, Henry Luce, desperate to keep his star writer, asked him why he was leaving. He gave four reasons: June, July, August and September.

His taste for generalisations grew with the eating. He produced three of the great works of post-war sociology: “The End of Ideology” (1960), “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society” (1973) and “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” (1978). On the Times Literary Supplement’s list of the 100 most influential books since the second world war, two were by Mr Bell.

Many of Mr Bell’s insights remain as relevant today as when he first broached them. For example, the transition from industrial to consumer capitalism, which he chronicled in America decades ago, is now happening in China and India. Even when he was wrong, Mr Bell was wrong in thought-provoking ways. A few hours with his oeuvre is worth more than a week in Davos (and is less likely to cause skiing injuries).

“The End of Ideology” described the political landscape of the post-cold-war world 30 years before the cold war ended. Mr Bell argued that the great ideological struggles that had defined the first half of the 20th century were exhausted. The new politics, he said, would be about boring administration, not the clash of ideals. His timing could hardly have been worse: the 1960s was one of the most ideologically charged decades in American history. Nonetheless, Mr Bell was right that the ideology of communism was doomed. In China it has given way to market Leninism. In Russia it has been replaced by kleptocracy.

Mr Bell spent the next decade and a bit working on a huge book, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society”, a term he coined and which caught on. Many of the book’s insights—about the shift from manufacturing to services, the rise of knowledge workers and the waning of the class struggle—have now become so familiar that it is easy to forget how fresh they were in 1973. However, Mr Bell failed to spot one of the revolutions that was whirling around him: the transition from the managerial capitalism that he witnessed at Fortune to a much more freewheeling entrepreneurial capitalism. Perhaps this was the price he paid for spurning Luce and moving to academia.

Many of his other insights still bite. He argued that the old-fashioned class struggle was being replaced by other, equally vexatious conflicts: for example, between the principles of equality and meritocracy in higher education. He also anticipated the current debate about happiness by pointing out that material progress cannot eliminate the frustrations inherent in the zero-sum competition for power, prestige and the attention of the sexiest person in the room. The more people are free to rise on their own merits, the more they will race on the treadmill for status.

Mr Bell’s best book was “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism”. In it he raised the possibility that the material abundance that capitalism produces might destroy the very virtues that had made capitalism possible in the first place. Capitalism, as Max Weber said, depends on the Puritan virtues of hard work, thrift and deferred gratification. But modern consumerism was stimulating the appetite for instant gratification and irrational self-expression, Mr Bell worried. The Protestant ethic was being destroyed by the shopping mall and the counter-culture.

This argument is not watertight. Despite Mr Bell’s cultural contradictions and Karl Marx’s economic contradictions, capitalism is still going strong. In “Bobos in Paradise” David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, argued that a cocktail of bourgeois virtues and bohemian values can prove economically invigorating. Some of the most successful companies in recent years have been founded by such un-Puritanical figures as Sir Richard Branson (Virgin), Steve Jobs (Apple) and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (Ben & Jerry’s). High-tech companies such as Google have no difficulty in combining the profit motive with the ethos of a campus. But in one area Mr Bell was prescient: he worried that consumerism was encouraging people to borrow more money than they could reasonably hope to repay.

He was even more prescient about what might be called “the cultural contradictions of the welfare state”. This was the subject of passionate debate in the pages of the Public Interest, a journal he co-founded in 1965 with another poor-boy-made-good, Irving Kristol. The welfare state cannot last unless someone creates the wealth to pay for it. But interest groups demand ever more from the state, and politicians jostle to promise more goodies. As the welfare state expands, it can eventually undermine people’s willingness to take risks or look after themselves.

Different strokes for different folks

One of Mr Bell’s most provocative insights ran throughout his work. This was the idea that, contrary to what economic determinists such as Marx said, different “realms” of society could operate according to different principles. (Always wary of the neoconservative label that Kristol embraced with such enthusiasm, Mr Bell described himself as a “socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture”.) Capitalism might co-exist just as happily with Chinese authoritarianism as with American democracy, he reckoned. In this, one hopes that the great polymath was wrong.

Gary Moore! (RIP)