Obituaries

On 17 February death finally claimed Jean-René Chauvin. It seems almost miraculous that he has died now, aged 92, and not much earlier. His memoirs contain an unbelievable sentence where he states that, after his incarceration in the Mauthausen and Auschwitz concentration camps, he found the atmosphere in Buchenwald "much more relaxed".

Dorothy Thompson, who has died aged 87, was one of the post-1945 era's leading socialist and feminist historians and a political activist of considerable note and impact.

She was married for many years to the socialist historian E P Thompson, who died in 1993, and her work and activity were in some ways complementary to, and at least equal to, his own. Edward studied Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for example, while Dorothy focused on the period immediately afterwards - that of Chartism, the first great working class movement.

(Photo: Monire Childs)

Author Alan Sillitoe died on 25 April 2010. He will be best remembered for his powerful novels and stories of working class life, such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Key to the Door, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and a ferocious work of family biography, Raw Material.

Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present (1980) reached a mass audience by the beginning of the 21st century with over 2 million copies sold by 2009. It actually became part of US popular culture. Only a couple of months before Zinn's sudden death, a documentary film based on the book was released, The People Speak.

Current Marxist thinking has been greatly impoverished since last June. With the untimely death of thinkers like Peter Gowan, Giovanni Arrighi, Chris Harman and now Daniel Bensaïd, we are sadly deprived of what each one of these regretted friends and comrades could have contributed, at a time when their intellectual production was in full swing.

Chris was a formidable intellectual, Marxist theoretician and writer, but most importantly he was an activist. For him ideas were never to be separated from action. He was fearless in argument but generous with encouragement. His talent was to make even the most difficult ideas clear and when explaining something he would always say, "Do you follow?" If you didn't he would happily start from beginning and go through it again.

His enduring legacy may well be the volumes of the Dictionary of Labour Biography that he edited, detailing the lives of many of the women and men who were active in the labour movement from the late 18th century.

Only someone with an extensive knowledge of the movement as a participant could possibly have embarked on such a project.

It would be wrong to describe Augusto Boal as a theatre director, a dramatist, a producer or an actor, though he was all of those things. Returning to his native Brazil in 1955 from the US with a degree in theatre arts, he was hired to work for the famous Arena Theatre, which challenged the social realism of the theatre of the time with the ideas of Bertolt Brecht.

He came from a comfortable background (his father was a doctor and he went to public school and Cambridge). But the disaster of the First World War shook all classes to the core. And like his more famous younger contemporaries, the poet W H Auden and his admirer and fellow novelist Christopher Isherwood, Upward was part of a revolt against the clapped out culture of the past.

Everything stopped for a moment when I heard of his death on 21 December. In that instant I remembered all those times he stood before me, the poetry of love and life and anger and outrage filling whatever space he had come to perform in. I stood with him in the middle of Piccadilly on 15 February 2003 - speechless, as we felt 2 million human beings for peace and against war moving around us like a slow, wide river. Adrian was momentarily the rock midstream.