13 February 2012 12:00 AM
Whitney Houston, who has died at the age of 48, was a dazzling performer who blazed a trail for a new generation of black female singers, from Beyoncé Knowles to Mary J Blige.
13 February 2012 12:00 AM
Many leading politicians in the House of Commons, to which I was first elected in 1962, had remarkably supportive spouses.
12 February 2012 12:00 AM
Whitney Houston, who reigned as pop music's queen until her majestic voice and regal image were ravaged by drug use, erratic behavior and a tumultuous marriage to singer Bobby Brown, has died. She was 48.
11 February 2012 12:00 AM
Florence Green, who has died aged 110, was the last known surviving veteran of the First World War, serving with the Women's Royal Air Force at airbases in Norfolk.
11 February 2012 12:00 AM
When Don Cornelius convinced Howard Shapiro, owner of the independent Chicago station WCIU-TV, to let him produce and present Soul Train, a weekly show dedicated to African-American music, in 1970, he was a man on a mission.
11 February 2012 12:00 AM
Zelda Curtis was no follower of fashion.
10 February 2012 12:00 AM
Marge Carey started her working life checking football pools coupons for Vernons in Liverpool but her rise to prominence in the Labour and trade union movement owed more to hard work than luck. After many years as a shop steward representing low-paid workers she rose to become both one of the few women officials in a union where the senior posts were dominated by men, and one of the leading figures in the Labour Party. The former Prime Minister Tony Blair said of her, "She was a wonderful woman full of strongly expressed common sense, goodwill and good judgement."
10 February 2012 12:00 AM
Josh Gifford, who died yesterday of a heart attack at the age of 70, will be forever remembered for training Aldaniti to victory in the Grand National in 1981, a win which famously came after his jockey, Bob Champion, had recovered from cancer. After a successful career as a jockey himself, both in National Hunt and on the Flat, Gifford went on to train more than 1,500 winners. He was champion jockey on four occasions and finished second in the 1967 Grand National on Honey End behind the legendary winner Foinavon.
10 February 2012 12:00 AM
Zalman King's stylish erotica includes the TV-friendly Red Shoe Diaries, introduced by a pre-X-Files David Duchovny, and 91/2 Weeks but he began his career as a dramatic actor and continued to make occasional forays into non-erotic cinema. Zalman Lefkowitz changed his name when he began acting, starting as a gang member in Harland Ellison's autobiographical "Memo from Purgatory" (1964), an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
09 February 2012 12:00 AM
Alone, five miles up, in an unarmed, pale pastel-painted Spitfire, 22-year-old Flying Officer Freddie Ball proved himself a master of one of the RAF's most dangerous wartime duties, photo-reconnaissance over enemy-held territory in daylight. Taking pictures over Germany during the Second World War, Ball had only elapsed time, dead reckoning and a compass to get him home with the precious photographs after a six-hour sortie in an unpressurised, unheated cabin keeping to about 30,000 feet to avoid making a give-away condensation trail.
09 February 2012 12:00 AM
The music critic and sometime Music Editor of The Independent, Robert Maycock, who has died in a car accident, was among the most principled and independent-minded writers on classical and contemporary music of his generation. As a regular contributor to this newspaper since its inception, he wrote perceptively on music of many kinds. He also worked tirelessly to promote an unusually wide range of music and a reconsideration of the path that he considered new music should take.
09 February 2012 12:00 AM
Non-Hollywood films need nurturing in America. The producer-distributor Bingham Ray spotted potential hits, brought them to the screen and, with canny marketing, made them commercially and critically successful. He worked with Mike Leigh, David Lynch and Lars von Trier among others, and also helped kick-start American interest in Iranian cinema. Ray's enthusiasm for cinema was huge and infectious, yet unlike some independent producers he strove to bring the film-makers' vision to the screen rather than impose his own.
08 February 2012 12:00 AM
The record producer, songwriter and singer Winston Riley was a mainstay of the Jamaican music scene and one of its most successful figures for close to five decades. In the 1960s he formed The Techniques and sang bass with the vocal group popular throughout the ska and rock steady eras for their joyous adaptations of US R&B hits by The Impressions – "You Don't Care" and "Minstrel and Queen (Queen Majesty)" – and The Temptations – "I Wish It Would Rain" – as well as his compositions like "Love Is Not A Gamble" and "Everywhere Everyone".
08 February 2012 12:00 AM
Antoni Tapies was the most important Catalan artist of the 20th century. He was a self-taught painter and sculptor, his later works instantly recognisable for their stark contrasts of colour, incorporation of found materials and widespread use of written language and geometric symbols.
08 February 2012 12:00 AM
A prolific screen character actor for half a century, Frederick Treves was most often seen as authorityfigures, from military types, barons and professors to doctors and headmasters. A doctor's son himself – and great-nephew of Sir Frederick Treves, the surgeon who discovered the "Elephant Man", Joseph Merrick – Treves fitted such roles like a glove, playing them in an easy, relaxed manner, with never a hint of over-acting.
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