Always a fissiparous lot no doubt their natural attraction to doctrinal disputation was aggravated by agents provocateurs of various kinds

Always a fissiparous lot, no doubt their natural attraction to doctrinal disputation was aggravated by agents provocateurs of various kinds. Evidently the Russians were not anxious to leave them unobserved: but other intelligence agencies also maintained constant fishing expeditions.In self-defence, Ernest Mandel and his comrades opted for a complex style of life All embraced pseudonyms, sometimes more than one Mandel became famous under the name Germain. He escaped, with the help of former socialists among the prison guards.By the end of the Second World War, the European Trotskyists were a beleaguered group. He took part in the distribution of a clandestine bulletin aimed at the German Army, with the intention of fomenting unrest. Three times he was arrested, and once he was consigned to Auschwitz. He had come under the influence of a small Trotskyist group led by Abram Leon.

In the tumultuous events which followed, Henri Mandel decided to leave for Antwerp, which is where young Ernest spent his childhood.Ernest was 16 years old when the Second World War broke out, and had already enrolled himself as an active socialist By the following year he was working in the Resistance. An original dissident in Communism, he never stopped engaging the social democratic tradition. Mandel was born in 1923 in Germany, where his father had moved after the Russian Revolution to help the German Communists establish a branch of the Soviet Press Agency. It would be difficult to find anyone more intimately involved with the socialist tradition in Europe than Ernest Mandel. A dedicated revolutionist, he also spent much of his life trying to influence reformist parties. Ernest Mandel, economist: born Frankfurt 5 April 1923; books include Late Capitalism 1972, The Second Slump 1978, Power and Money 1983; twice married; died Brussels 20 July 1995. But, barring a few weeks of indisposition, she continued to dictate her column, which lost none of its chutzpah.Immaculately coiffured and always dressed in a white sari, Chaubal presided over Bollywood like a high priestess, puncturing idols, bringing them down to ground level with a bang.. She commanded respect amongst producers and is credited with launching the career of Rajesh Khanna, one of Bollywood's most successful actors in the Seventies and now an MP.Chaubal's frenetic way of life, however, led to a paralytic stroke in 1985 which confined her first to a wheelchair and later to bed.

That remark triggered off Chaubal's ambivalent relationship towards Bollywood's stars, lasting over four decades.Chaubal's sources were credible and, though her writing was saucy and uproariously amusing, it was never malicious. As a teenager she reportedly forced her way into the house of Meena Kumari, Bollywood's "tragedy queen" of the Fifties and Sixties, for an autograph.While the beautiful actress signed Chaubal's autograph book, she also patronisingly told the shy teenager never to wear skirts as her legs were too long and stocky for her school uniform. She was embarrassingly politically correct in her reportage and created a new lexicon of film jargon which caught the imagination of her vast audience: she once referred to the new crop of actresses as "badans", or bodies, and to some of the newer Bollywood faces as "kachra", or garbage.Chaubal was born in Maharashtra state, western India, into an opulent horse-racing family; her father was a rich barrister practising in Bombay. Stung by her accuracy and bluntness, at least one star tried to beat her up at a party and scores of others attempted to sue her. But none could intimidate Chaubal, who strode majestically through film studios during the day and partied till dawn, collecting and corroborating stories.Added to the woes of those who tried to humble her was the cannonade she let loose against them for weeks afterwards, for Chaubal had the memory of an elephant and was not afraid of being nasty and unpopular.Chaubal's "Frankly Speaking" fortnightly column in Star and Style, India's popular film magazine of the Sixties and Seventies, and the equally well- circulated Eve's Weekly, generated fear in Bollywood heroes for her bluntness and insider information on who was doing what and to whom. The gossip columnist Devyani Chaubal embodied the essence of Bollywood, India's film industry based in Bombay. For nearly 25 years her poison pen dented egos, driving cinema idols into a raging frenzy. Devyani Chaubal, journalist: born Maharashtra state 1942; died Bombay 13 July 1995.

Once he had made his mark he escaped from England, living for 15 years in Europe before settling in Arizona where he lived, happily writing his stories (his latest was finished only weeks before he died), for the last 20 years of his life.. The Flight of the Phoenix (1964) was a superb piece of genre fiction which featured the rebuilding of a crashed aircraft deep in the Saharan wastes; Robert Aldrich made a masterly job of directing the film.Elleston Trevor was no master of complex characterisation, but as an ideas-man and a spinner of enthralling yarns he had few peers. The Billboard Madonna (1960) concerned the crazed and cut-throat hurly burly of American advertising; Bury Him Among Kings (1970) the disillusioned flower of the nation's youth during the First World War. Along with Nevil Shute, the Americans Erle Stanley Gardner, Erskine Caldwell and Frank Yerby, the Australian Arthur Upfield (whose skilful tales of his Aboriginal sleuth Detective Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte were much admired by Upfield's fellow-writers as well as eagerly sought out in the lending libraries), and the incomparable Georgette Heyer. At one stage a short Authors At Home promotional film was shot at Trevor's home in Roedean, near Brighton, where, he was glimpsed at his typewriter, and flying kites and racing miniature cars, both hobbies he followed with enthusiasm.With popularity came a widening of his fictive boundaries. Alan Hill, a Heinemann director, once congratulated him on the astonishingly detailed background to one of his spy thrillers, The Warsaw Document (1970), in which Quiller nimbly spikes KGB big guns by wrecking a Soviet scheme to attack Warsaw.