Eel Pie Island Launch
Eel Pie Island was launched on Eel Pie Island – where else? – on Wednesday 7 October 2009, the eve of official publication. It was a classic island occasion, with an inconveniently high tide that prevented people from crossing the footbridge, and it was raining heavily. More...

Latest Obituaries
My oldest-ever “client” in the obituary field, written ages ago for “stock” and kept in The Guardian system, finally made it into the paper on 20 July 2009: Henry Allingham, who fought in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, and at Passchendaele in 1917. He was not only Britain’s oldest man but also the oldest man ever known to have lived in the UK – and the world’s oldest man too, according to the Guinness Book of Records. He had just turned 113 (one hundred and thirteen…).

Almost as old as Henry was Andrée Peel, 105 when she died on 3 March 2010. She was a heroine of the French Resistance, helping to save over 100 shot-down airmen and earning a chestful of medals from France, Britain and America. Having married an Englishman, she died near Bristol and her obituary made The Guardian on March 11.

Countess Freya von Moltke was only 98 when she died on New Year's Day. She was a key figure in the Germal internal opposition to Hitler which culminated in the abortive bomb plot of July 1944. Her obituary appeared on January 8.

Jens-Anton Poulson was even younger at 91 when he died on February 2. He was another resistance hero, this time from Norway, where he took part in the famous "Heroes of Telemark" raid on a hydro-electric plant that produced heavy water for the Nazi atomic programme. His obituary got stuck in the system and made the paper on 11 March 2010.

Eugene Terre'Blanche, "a cross between Moses and Mussolini", was a resitance figure of a different stamp entirely: he ran an Afrikaner diehard terror campaign against the demolition of apartheid under Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and was murdered at his farm, allegedly by black workers he had not paid.

More obituaries can be found at www.guardian.co.uk/news by searching under my name.