Legacy Matters

Obits from the London Times

Distinguished lives in brief.

J.G. Ballard

The young J. G. Ballard, revealed in his most popular novel Empire of the Sun, was far more in awe of Japanese kamikaze pilots than he was interested in being liberated from his internment camp. Similarly the adult Ballard found the enslavement of man to his own devices — concrete, technology, cameras and crashing cars — monstrous and terrifying, yet fascinating and ceaselessly inspiring.
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His dispassionate visions of modernity and apocalyptic imagery earned him the rare honour of seeing his name adjectivised: Collins English Dictionary describes “Ballardian” as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak manmade landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”.
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Although Ballard was frequently called a writer of science fiction, he abhored the term, explaining instead that his books “pictured the psychology of the future”.

It was 40 years before Ballard felt able to write about the most formative events in his life. Empire of the Sun is unusual for a Ballard novel in that its young protagonist is instantly likable, his story moving. It was his most saleable novel, made into a Hollywood epic by Steven Spielberg with the young Christian Bale as Ballard. It was not, he insists, an autobiography but a “negotiated truth” from which he excised, among other things, the parents who had shared his ordeal.

Professor Jack Good: mathematician and wartime codebreaker

The mathematician Jack Good played a key role among the codebreaking team at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. He went on to help to build one of the first computers, was the father of a branch of modern statistics and contributed to the development of artificial intelligence.

Good was born Isidore Jacob Gudak to a Polish-Jewish family in London in 1916; his father was a watchmaker and well known in Yiddish literary circles. Isidore later anglicised his name to Irving John Good but he was always known as Jack. Good was slow to learn to read, but partly as a result of being bed-bound with diphtheria at the age of 9 — when he began to discover mathematics for himself — his extraordinary intelligence became clear to his teachers.

Robert Anderson: American playwright

Robert Anderson, the American playwright, explored sexual identity, infidelity and relationship breakdown in emotional dramas which broke new ground in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also a screenwriter and novelist.

His play Tea and Sympathy, a Broadway hit in 1953, sought to expose postwar conformity and the narrow views of the time of how men were expected to act. It tells the story of a sensitive student, Tom, who is accused of being homosexual by his classmates. He seeks solace from his housemaster’s wife, Laura, who, in order to reassure him of his masculinity, ends up seducing him. Manliness, the wife tells her husband “is not all swagger and swearing and mountain-climbing”. “Manliness is also tenderness, gentleness, consideration.” Tom was played by John Kerr and Laura by Deborah Kerr in the original theatre cast, as well as in the 1956 film version.

At the end of the play, the housemaster’s wife Laura utters the now-famous line to Tom: “Years from now when you talk about this — and you will — be kind.”

Father Stanley Jaki: Benedictine priest, physicist and theologian

Stanley Jaki, a Benedictine priest and a physicist, was best known for his scholarly contributions to the philosophy of science and theology. In 1987 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for his work on analysing “the importance of differences as well as similarities between science and religion, adding significant, balanced enlightenment to the field”.
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Jaki strongly believed in the conjunction between faith and reason and argued that science flourished in Europe because of the Christian understanding of creation and the Incarnation.
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Jaki was a prolific author, publishing more than 40 books, hundreds of articles, reviews, chapters and lectures. His books, many of them analysing the relationships between modern science and orthodox Christianity, reflect the extraordinary range of his interests and his exceptional abilities. Among them are: The Relevance of Physics (1966); Brain, Mind and Computers (1969); The Milky Way: an Elusive Road for Science (1973); Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe (1974); Miracles and Physics (1989); God and the Cosmologists (1989); and Bible and Science (1996).

In addition, he wrotes studies of G. K. Chesterton, Pierre Duhem, the French mathematician, physicist and historian of science, and Cardinal Newman, and he translated some important works, including the first English version of a study of Copernicus (1975) and Immanuel Kant’s Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1775/1981).
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For all his immense recognition in scholarly circles, Jaki’s groundbreaking work on science, philosophy, ethics, religion and culture has undoubtedly had a considerable influence and relevance that have yet to be adequately recognised

Tom Braden: CIA official and political journalist

Thomas Braden was a CIA paymaster in the 1950s funding anti-communist activity all over the world. He later defended, and then criticised, the machinations of the CIA in hardhitting newspaper columns. He went on to help to launch and co-host the hugely popular and highly influential US political debate show Crossfire from 1982-1989. Away from politics, his memoir about his chaotic family life as the father of eight children, Eight is Enough, was adapted into a hit TV comedy on ABC that ran for four years from 1977.