Tim Worstall

Or so the obit says for Ronald Searle. So an entirely different point: In October 1935 the Cambridge Daily News accepted his offer to provide a weekly cartoon, for which he was paid a guinea a week. If we upgrade that by inflation we get to £80 to £150 a week as his fee. Depends [...]

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Aye: The world is a better place for him having been in it. Would that they will say that after the rest of us fuckwits pass on. Vale, eh?

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Vaclav Havel, died 18 Dec 2011.

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He went on to serve as head of station in Bonn, and during the 1960s in Beirut, where he enjoyed skiing at The Cedars, a resort where, as he recalled, discipline in the lift queues improved dramatically after an attendant shot dead the two worst queue jumpers.

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Swedish beauty whose affair with JFK began weeks before his marriage – and carried on just after If we’re going to have newspaper obituaries for everyone JFK shagged we’re going to need several new newspapers, aren’t we?

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Assistant manager at Marks and Sepncers. Enlists at 26 in 1940. Wins three MCs with the Paras. End of the war, back to M&S as a store manager. An extraordinary 5 years piece of Major John Timothy’s life.

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“For the first half of my life I was always known as my father’s son, and now I am known as my daughter’s father.” There are worse things to achieve in life.

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Steve Jobs: co-founder of Apple dies aged 56 He really did work right up to the end, didn’t he? But this price allegedly should have been $21.10, thereby incurring a taxable charge of $20 million that Jobs did not report as income. Lordy, no, that’s not what the problem with backdated options was: although it’s [...]

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Not a bad thing to have left behind. More than 30 years on, the appeal of Dad’s Army endures. Repeats attract more than 10 million viewers, and the famous “Don’t tell him, Pike!” scene has repeatedly been voted the funniest television moment of all time.

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These scions of the Guinness family: More recently, in 2004, Kindersley went into his local branch of Waitrose . Asked by the checkout girl if he would like some cash back, Kindersley (who was unfamiliar with this transaction) replied: “That’s really awfully sweet of you, how kind.” He suggested £50, which he took across the [...]

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That’s the photo to go with Jet Harris’ obituary. I’m not entirely convinced that it actually is Jet Harris. But even if it were, bit odd to illustrate the obit of an iconic bass player with him holding a regular guitar, eh?

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She swore that after Tony Crosland, she could never again experience a close relationship. But in the mid-1980s she struck up a friendship with Auberon Waugh that deepened until his death in 2001. She dedicated her novel The Prime Minister’s Wife (2001) to him. Waugh had no intention of leaving his wife, but the couple [...]

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Legend had it that he was once been consulted by a Ladbrokes manager who had been asked to make a book on the name of the next Archbishop of Canterbury, but did not know where to start. “You want a start, I’ll give you a start,” Stein replied. “The Chief Rabbi’s 1,000 to one.”

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Nor would I ever try and insist that anyone else should do what he did. But damme, I do admire Allan Tibbels.

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“My brother, Merrick, and I are, of course devastated by the loss of our father, but we rejoice in having been the sons of such an extraordinary man.” Felix Francis Not a bad way to be remembered after 89 years on the planet, is it?

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Norman Borlaug has died. It’s said variously that 250 million people have been saved from death by his life’s work or that 1 billion people have been saved from starvation. By Mr. Toenniessen’s calculation, about half the world’s population goes to bed every night after consuming grain descended from one of the high-yield varieties developed [...]

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In the obituary of this brave man (in the paper, not online version) his photo has as the caption: "Webb: Monty once demanded his advice for curing constipation." An interesting way to be remembered.

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I find myself agreeing with the Grauniad: Her shamelessness never became her more than in the manner of her dying.

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i’m in the uncomfortable position of thinking that we’ve lost something of a national treasure. The first time she was mentioned in the press, in May 2002, Jade Goody was described as a "pretty dental nurse, 20, from London". But 24 hours later, as she began her gobby, ignorant trajectory in the Big Brother house, [...]

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