Péter Eötvös, Hungarian composer who turned Angels in America into an opera – obituary
Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 space flight gave him a lifelong obsession with ‘how to translate the idea of the cosmos into a gigantic ambient sound’

Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 space flight gave him a lifelong obsession with ‘how to translate the idea of the cosmos into a gigantic ambient sound’
He took 1,000 wickets bowling leg-breaks, a rare feat, and he once took Princess Margaret to a nightclub in Barbados
He observed trends such as how the 19th-century life-insurance boom led to a rise in murder for profit, with victims including many infants
Though he won awards in his own right he was a team player, saying: ‘My job is to come in and move the story along. I’m a character man’
His ‘quintessential Englishness’ was evident in ‘a good suit and tie even in the hottest weather and profound, perhaps excessive, courtesy’
He found high rates of alcoholism and male suicide among the Inuit after they were ejected from their land to make way for a US airbase
His film about pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela led to a letter from Mary Whitehouse telling him he was ‘a light unto the nation’
‘I knew right away I’d invented something new,’ he said of his original ‘Sparko Box’
Henson drove off machine-gun and grenade attacks from all sides and carried a dead comrade more than a mile back to the battalion lines
In Drinking and Hooting Machine, performers with bottles of beer alternate between gulping and blowing, like a chorus of mournful owls
He had to wait two decades to write his script after the Queen Mother asked him to wait until she died
In 1969, as commander of Apollo 10, he also flew the lunar module almost to the Moon’s surface in a crucial dress rehearsal for the landings
His career flourished despite a childhood accident that rendered one of his fingers unusable
He was celebrated in the fashion press as a ‘devilish altar boy to Vivienne Westwood’s high priestess’
The song has been covered by more than 120 bands but began as ‘a piece of vengeful poetry’ after the break-up of his first band
Larkin was an influence and friend but they were poles apart politically and Brownjohn contributed to an anthology for Jeremy Corbyn
A telephone call from Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead in 1970 sent his audio career on to a new level
He believed that ‘you can’t live your life just focusing on all the dangers. Death is a part of life and when your time is up, it’s up’
In a final sermon he attacked a tendency of some in the Church to resent ‘uppity’ cathedrals and try to impose a ‘monochrome blandness’
She won a string of beauty contests, including Miss Great Britain 1950, which led to her being cast in the comedy Lady Godiva Rides Again