Obituary: Nora Beloff

When Nora Beloff and I were at the King Alfred School in the late 1930s, writes Professor J. R. Pole [further to the obituary by William Millinship, 15 February], the maths teacher had a certain engaging eccentricity which Nora caught in a limerick in the school magazine:

The mathematical master wears

braces

With pulleys attached at odd places;

The strain never grows great

As they self-compensate

On a complex mechanical basis.

As possibly the only survivor who knows of this literary episode, I place it in the record - not least because it recalls a sense of humour which people did not always attribute to her.

May I make some corrections to my obituary? writes William Millinship. Ms Beloff did not abandon her book on the former Yugoslavia. She finished the text before she died, and the book, Yugoslavia: the avoidable war, will be published in spring or summer this year by the New European Press.

Nora Beloff left Paris soon after General de Gaulle returned to power in 1958.

I should have made clear that, in my view, she was at heart a conservative, with a small "c".