My grandmother Edith Redstone, who has died aged 101, was a co-author, in her 70s, of the popular book Growing Old Disgracefully, which suggested ways in which women can get the most out of their later years. Its publication in 1993 led to a global tour by Edith and its five other authors, and in the UK precipitated the launch of a nationwide network of Growing Old Disgracefully groups that still exists today.

Edith met her co-authors – all women and all over 60 - in the early 1990s on a course about ageing at the Hen House co-operative in Yorkshire, where they hatched the idea of the book. Subtitled “new ideas for getting the most out of life”, it challenged accepted views of growing old, and encouraged readers to learn to age with a sense of self-esteem and playfulness.

My father, Paul Kennedy, who has died aged 78 after suffering from pancreatic cancer, was a writer and sociologist, and a hugely popular lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. His final book, Vampire Capitalism (2018), was a prescient study of the devastating effects of liberal capitalism on both the masses and the environment. He also co-authored, with Robin Cohen, the influential Global Sociology (2000), published in eight languages.

His early published works, including Ghanaian Businessmen (1980) and African Capitalism (1988), focused on development issues in west Africa, where his sympathy towards indigenous entrepreneurs was viewed as heresy by the Marxists dominating the field in the 1970s and 80s. In the late 90s he co-founded the Global Studies Association, working with academics from all over the world to analyse the impact of globalisation on the lives of ordinary people.

Fighter against apartheid in South Africa who spent 22 years in jail after being convicted with Nelson Mandela in the Rivonia trial

Denis Goldberg, who has died aged 87, was sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Nelson Mandela and nine others in the 1964 Rivonia trial, in which he was found guilty by the South African authorities of sabotage.

The only white man to be convicted and, at 31, the youngest of the defendants, Goldberg was a mainstay of the ANC’s military operation in Cape Town, obtaining bomb ingredients and instructing recruits on how to handle them. There was no doubt about his guilt, and he did not deny it.

Head of BBC radio drama who was instrumental in the success of Joe Orton, Sue Townsend, Tom Stoppard and others

To readers of books, John Tydeman is a fictional BBC producer who loomed large in the literary aspirations of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole. To Townsend, as for many other writers, he was the real-life radio drama producer who encouraged her, produced her first radio play about the secret diary of “Nigel” Mole, and then introduced her to the publishers Methuen.

As with another of Tydeman’s proteges, Joe Orton, Townsend’s success was dizzying. Between the debut of Nigel in January 1982 and the publication of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ that September – simultaneously read as a serial on Radio 4 – Townsend had provided Adrian with a book’s worth of diary entries and become a publishing sensation. For the rest of Townsend’s life, Adrian would continue to submit poetry to Tydeman, who would continue to reply with growing exasperation. His letters, with Adrian’s poems, were published by Penguin in 2017.

Textile designer whose colourful creations helped banish postwar greyness

The textile designer Althea McNish, who has died aged 95, was responsible for some of the 20th century’s most memorable printed fabrics. A hugely influential figure in the world of interior design and fashion, she was also the first woman from the West Indies to rise to international prominence in her field. She claimed to see everything “through a tropical eye”, and her greatest contribution was to infuse designs created in Britain with a feel of the Caribbean.

Her work from the late 1950s onwards appealed to young consumers who were desperate to move beyond the greyness of the immediate post-second world war years, and right from the beginning of her career she attracted commissions to design fabrics for big names such as Liberty and Heal’s. “She led the way, overthrowing the sterile rules of taste that had previously shaped British and international design,” said the designer and curator Christine Checkinksa.

McNish also worked on dress fabrics for Zika Ascher’s textile company, which supplied them to French fashion houses, including Dior. Her work was regularly featured in glossy magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

Cellist of the Amadeus String Quartet for four decades

The cellist Martin Lovett, who has died aged 93 after contracting Covid-19, acted as the musical conscience of the Amadeus String Quartet. When the playing of his three colleagues – all Austrian exiles – threatened to become too sweet, Lovett could be relied on to bring them back to the right side of good taste with a finely drawn phrase from his Stradivarius instrument.

Like Hermann Busch, a player he deeply admired, of the Busch Quartet, Lovett displayed qualities that could be overlooked when set against the wayward genius of the leader, Norbert Brainin, the virtuosity of the violist, Peter Schidlof, and the solid accomplishment of the second violinist, Siegmund Nissel. And yet his very dependability, his quintessentially British avoidance of anything that smacked of showiness or gloss, made their own contributions to the quartet’s four decades of success.

Singer whose joyful vocals on My Boy Lollipop took Jamaican music to new audiences

With international sales of 5m copies in 1964, the year of its release, the hit single My Boy Lollipop, sung by Millie, who has died aged 72, “opened the door for Jamaican music to the world,” said the producer Chris Blackwell. He had flown the 16-year-old Millie Small from Kingston to London to manage her career. Millie’s shrill, joyful vocals, married to a galloping ska rhythm in Olympic Studios in London in an arrangement by the Jamaican master guitarist Ernest Ranglin, were beamed out all that summer from the new pirate radio stations, such as Caroline, that were instrumental in helping promote the record. In May 1964, two months after the release of My Boy Lollipop, Millie was given a guest appearance on the ITV special Around the Beatles.

In both the UK and the US, My Boy Lollipop was a No 2 hit, kept off the top slot respectively by the Searchers and the Beach Boys. In America Millie rode the slipstream of the British Invasion started by the Beatles six months earlier; in New York she stepped off a plane – dubbed the Lollipop Special by a clever publicist – from the UK to a 30-strong police guard; fans screamed as she was presented with what was said to be the world’s largest lollipop.

Co-founder of the pioneering German electronic band Kraftwerk

As one of the chief architects of the electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk, Florian Schneider, who has died of cancer aged 73, helped revolutionise popular music. Where guitars, bass and drums had long been considered its essential building blocks, Kraftwerk paved the way for synth-pop, techno, hip-hop and electronica, in the process proving that microchips and machines could have not only soul, but a sense of humour too. The list of artists whose work is indebted to Kraftwerk, even if they did not always know it, is endless, but includes David Bowie, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds, New Order, The Orb, Madonna, Neil Young, Jay-Z, Afrika Bambaataa, Coldplay and Daft Punk. In 1997 the New York Times described Kraftwerk as “the Beatles of electronic dance music”.

With Schneider and Ralf Hütter proving the main creative impetus, Kraftwerk (German for “power station”) reached their pivotal moment with the release of their fourth album, Autobahn (1974), whose 23-minute title track – a euphoric electronic ode to the joys of driving on Germany’s high-speed motorways, delivered with a light and whimsical touch – became emblematic of the group’s sound and approach. The album reached No 4 in Britain, while the single version of Autobahn reached the the UK Top 20 and the German Top 10. This revolution in synthetic music earned Kraftwerk a spot on BBC television’s science programme Tomorrow’s World in 1975. They subsequently scored a UK chart-topping single, The Model, released with Computer Love (1981), but Kraftwerk’s influence was much further-reaching than mere chart positions would suggest.

Specialist in the control of chemical and biological warfare who guided experts and policymakers from east and west

Julian Perry Robinson, who has died aged 78, combined academic research with behind-the-scenes advocacy to enhance controls on some of the most inhumane weapons in the world. His focus was on issues related to chemical and biological warfare (CBW) and the international efforts to eradicate the use or possession of such weapons.

In the late 1960s, with cold war differences between the major powers on the control of biological weapons, he examined the challenges of CBW in factual terms rather than the rhetoric of the time. A key concept Julian promoted – that all disease-causing organisms and the toxins they produce should be considered biological weapons, unless held for clearly peaceful purposes – became the core of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, the first treaty to ban a whole class of weapons of mass destruction. This concept, which became known as the “general purpose criterion”, has meant the convention has not been overtaken by scientific and technological developments.

Psychologist whose 50-year study transformed attitudes to people with Down’s syndrome

In 1964, Janet Carr, a clinical psychologist, was asked to work on a follow-up study of 54 six-week-old babies with Down’s syndrome at the Maudsley hospital in London. Initially Carr, who has died aged 92, was going to track the children only until they were four, but it became one of the longest follow-up studies in the world.

In 2014, a party was held at the House of Lords to celebrate the study running for 50 years. Chris Oliver, the director of the Cerebra centre for neurodevelopmental disorders at Birmingham University, commented: “The longest follow-up studies we have are usually five to seven years. So that 50-year follow-up is absolutely remarkable.”

Renowned Welsh physicist whose work helped to forge Britain’s reputation as a global leader in climate science

The late 1980s marked a key moment for environmental science, matching triumph with looming disaster. Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had been observed since the late 1950s, at the remote Pacific observatory of Mauna Loa, but it was only after three decades of further research that concern over what this rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases might mean reached the desks of the world’s leaders.

At the time, politicians appeared receptive to scientific warnings in a way they rarely have been since. In 1987, world governments concluded the Montreal protocol, which still stands today as probably the most successful environmental intervention, phasing out the use of the ozone-depleting chemicals that had threatened to destroy the planet’s protective atmospheric layer.

In the aftermath of the recent developments within the Aam Aadmi Party, Himanshu Upadhyaya’s straight-from-the-heart essay describes the loss of hope and feeling of dejection among many idealists, who had fondly seeded and nurtured dreams of a politics of alternatives.

Tanski, Joachim S., author

Classicism and liberalism were two values that defined the man