Gene Wolfe

Unknown to non-genre readers, Gene Wolfe was regarded as perhaps the finest living fantasy writer at the time of his death. His quartet work opus The Book of the New Sun, released between 1980 and 1983, was regarded by no less an authority than Locus magazine as secondary only to Tolkien in the genre’s history. […]

Bibi Andersson

Ingmar Bergman’s…. shall we say complicated relationship with blonde actresses made Alfred Hitchcock look like an asexual with a slight preference for brunettes. Perhaps no actress best epitomised the Berman Blonde than Bibi Andersson. Bergman discovered her when he was reduced to filming TV commercials for soap during an early career downswing, and they went […]

Tommy Smith

I’m so, so sorry. We’ve been a bit busy at DDP Towers recently, and as a result are so late on Tommy Smith’s obituary that the newspapers have already moved on from paying tribute to the legendary Liverpool defender and are now reminding everyone that he was a big old racist. A racist Liverpool legend, […]

Ivor Broadis

It does feel as though Ivor Broadis had been England’s oldest former international since about 1973, so it’s no surprise that we finally bid farewell to him in 2019. He served with the RAF during the Second World War, but never saw active service. He got plenty of action on his return to civilian life […]

Georgia Engel

Georgia Engel got off to an inauspicious career as an actor. Her first job was in an off-Broadway show called The House of Blue Leaves, for which she was paid one dollar a performance. The theatre then burned down. That fire was a blessing in disguise, though. The House of Blue Leaves moved to Los […]

Richard Cole

The last surviving participant in the Doolittle Raid has, like the monkey, gone to heaven. Richard Cole was co-pilot of the first flight of said raid, which saw more than 80 US Air Force individuals take to the sky in the first significant aerial attack on the Japanese mainland following Pearl Harbor. Although the attack […]

David J. Thouless

Some days it feels as if 40% of the content on this site is dedicated to dead Nobel Prize winners… David J. Thouless got the Physics gong back in 2016, thanks to his work on “topological phase transitions”. What are topological phase transitions you ask? Well, they’re sudden changes between states of matter. Thouless was […]

Rex Garrod

A self-described “bodgineer”, Rex Garrod worked as a speedway driver before switching to the world of make-do-and-build engineering. He first came to wider attention with the Channel 4 daytime education show The Secret Life of Machines, where he and co-host Tim Hunkin explained how everything from vacuum cleaners to office lighting works. He went on […]

Sandy Ratcliff

Sandy Ratcliff was a member of the original Eastenders cast, and the first star of the show to find their life fodder for the tabloids. It was quite a life for them to delve into, though. Expelled from school at 14, she became a bassist for some minor rock bands before Lord Snowden picked her […]

Daniel Hanson

Nottingham isn’t just underachieving football teams and gun crime. It was also, until Daniel Hanson died, home to Britain’s best dressing gowns. A lecturer at Nottingham Trent University until a chance encounter with the Harrod’s menswear buyer on a train, Hanson turned a small endeavour into a globally recognised brand. His dressing gowns were favourites […]