Daily Telegraph' Book of Obituaries 20th Century Lives

The lives chosen represent a cross-section of 20th-century experience - from the Raj and the courts and chancelleries of Old Europe to the Jet Age and global mass-media. But the shrewd character sketches tend to be of dowagers rather than dictators, boffins rather than bureaucrats, popinjays rather than philosophers. For this is an essentially sympathetic, and frequently hilarious celebration of individual human diversity, with all its flesh and blood foibles and curious sidelights related in the deadpan, delicately ironic style for which the " Telegraph" obit is famous.