The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

Kevin FitzGerald Obituary: Emma McCune Off-Ml sutdq Worldly IhiifpeirboDe wisdom of the white Dinka with a Sudanese colleague in the vast expanses of bush in bombing raids carried out by government aircraft She met Riak at a hotel in Nairobi and it was love at first sight. They were married in June 1991 by a Presbyterian priest in a small village situated in swampy ground on the River Sobat in southern Sudan. On their way to the wedding, the vehicle they were driving broke down, and Emma arrived with her fine, white Ethiopian shawls edged with thorns and mud. Emma married Riak three months before he challenged John Garang for the leadership of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement Garang incorrectly blamed her for the split (she was in London when it happened). Her commitment to Riak's splinter faction was unwavering, but she inspired personal affection from people on Garang's side.

She was a natural politician, always interested in people and their predicament To Riak, she was an invaluable asset (albeit an unofficial one) in his struggle to gain recognition for his rebel faction. Recently Riak Machar's fortune had begun to change: he visited Washington, and the presidents of Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea met him for the first time in efforts to forge a reunion with Garang. Emma tall and a little toothy had sometimes been called by southern Sudanese, a "white the tribe to which Garang belongs. Riak comes from another Nilotic group, the Nuer. When she married him, she lost her job with Street Kids International as their representative, because the aid agency believed its impartiality had been compromised by her marrying one of the political players in Sudan's ian-yeancivil waPpThis hurt EMMA McCUNB, who has died aged 29 in a car accident in Nairobi, was a remarkable woman whose love affair with southern Sudan led to an even greater personal commitment her marriage in June 1991 to the Sudanese rebel leader Riak Machar.

Emma's life did not start in Africa, the continent that was to become her passion. She was born in Assam, India, where her father was an engineer working for a tea company. In 1966, her parents moved back to Britain but by the time of her father's suicide in 1976, her parents had been estranged for some time and were living apart. Aged only 12, the eldest of four children, Emma helped shoulder the burden. She grew up to be beautiful, clever, strong and tenacious; an unpretentious and determined person with many friends and remarkably few enemies.

After leaving school, Emma read art and art history at Oxford Polytechnic and became involved in Africa through the Refugees Studies Centre. She then took a year off from her studies and flew in a single-engined plane with a friend to Australia. Then, in 1988, she went for a two-week holiday to Kenya to see friends she had met at Oxford, and who had passed on their enthusiasm for the continent. By then, she had started a degree in African politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She went back to begin research on southern Sudan in the summer of 1989, but not long after she got her first job as an educational development officer in southern Sudan disappearing into the middle of the civil war with nothing more than a rucksack and a miniskirt.

More than once on her trips to schools in remote villages, she got caught along (Dorothy Revier Emma McCune with her husband, Riak Machar, the Sudanese rebel leader picted in a tiny "pair of pants" a Sudanese woman's perception of a miniskirt. From then on. she wore long skirts. She had always wanted to have children, and she was five months pregnant with her first child when she died. from hepatitis, had to run under Are for more than an hour.

She left Upper Nile and went back to Nairobi while the fighting continued. Her feet were full of splinters and cuts from running barefoot over stubble. She told her friends that such intense danger frightened her. This month she began work on her book again. Africa was her life, and she had the wis-.

'dom rare in outsiders 5--6 Perfect beauty from Poverty told eight of them, all thrillers: A Throne Of Bayonets, Quiet Under The Sun, It's Safe to England and others by Chandler out of Buchan and Stevenson, especially the last. On our first meeting he was already approaching 80 and we had corresponded for several years. His letters were quirky and encyclopaedic, humane, always encouraging to others, modest about himself, pungent with livcd-through advice. Health and sight both failing fast, he was working strenuously at memoirs which finally appeared when he was 84 under the title With O'Leary In The Grave. Immediately hailed as a minor comic masterpiece, it was serialised on Radio Four and re-issued in Oxford paperbacks for the outrageous vivacity of its characterisation.

The portrait of Kevin's father, the self-made grocer Michael FitzGerald, belongs with the great obses-sives of literature. By his side, Philip Gosse in Edmund Gosse's Father And Son seems almost listless, and much less benign. It was to literature that Kevin owed his foremost allegiance. Professionally, he farmed in Tipperary and Canada, then worked as general manager for 1CI in Ireland and later as its head of agricultural publicity. Recreationally, he played rugby for London Irish and was a member of the Alpine and the Climbers' Clubs.

Emotionally, as his master at the Oratory School (established by Newman) wrote, "FitzGerald was a boy the whole of whose interests lay outside the normal curriculum." He had a passion for good writing: Dickens, Browning, David Jones. Not to know this is to understand nothing about him, and it is a joy to me that he finally produced, in his blindness, a small masterpiece. I find it hard to accept that I'll never again hear the exquisitely turned periods of his talk; that there will be no more letters telling of how he never found anything to beat the pleasure of ploughing with a pair of horses on a fine October day in a van ished Ireland; no more aph oristic asides such as his comment that "Eneland.has Tnever learnt that there is only one Irish problem England." His health had entirely gone 12 years ago: "What with a fresh fall of snow last night, a general feeling's developing that it can't be long now," he wrote. In reply, I sent him my first edition of In Parenthesis. "I shall live another 10 years on the strength of this," he promised.

His wife Janet, founder of Women's Hour, died six years ago. He struggled on, still corresponding genially with many friends, in his beautiful thatched house in Chinnor, beneath the Chil-tern escarpment, with a Burmese cat, Thomas Lack, for company. At the first snow of this new winter on his home hills he finally gave up the most generous, rich and anachronistic ghost I ever encountered. Jim Perrin Kevin Columba FitzGerald, born June 19, 1902, died November 10, 1993. Crematorium, Derby, at 11 45 am.

Family flowers only, donations to The Mary Bookbinder Appeal for Amnesty International and local charities, co Lloyds Bank, Iron Gato, Derby. KILMER DonaM Bwait OBE, MA, PPRWA. On November 24, 1993. aged 95 years, at Berkeley Hospital, and of Wotton under-Edge, Gloucester, former principal ol the West of England Collego of Art, Bristol. Funoral service St Mary's Parish Church, Wot-ton-under-Edge.

on Friday. December 3, at 10 45 am, followed by cromalion at Wo6torlolgh. Family flowers only, donations lieu may be sent for the Artists' General Benevolent Institution, co Grimes and Goscombe Funeral Services. Chipping Manor, The Chipping, Wotton-under-Edgo. To place your aflnounimnt tate-pfcona 071-011 SOOO or 041-834 8860 whon hi rnrnmmAiirlprl "Rurl.

dhist economics" in which people produce what they need and right livelihood is a higher aim than increasing the gross national product. Economic morality is inherent in Christianity too, as it is in Islam, which forbids usury, and among Hindus whose everyday worship extols non-economic virtue. But where these religions have become dominant they have adapted comfortably to prevailing secular norms. Here, in our own moral desert, we can profit from this Buddhist call "to love without possessiveness, to hold beliefs without clinging to them, to oppose them without even if this return to basics is not at all what Mr Major has in mind. Beyond Optimism is published at E9.99 by Jon Carpenter, PO Box 129, Oxford OX1 4PH.

HE FIGURE in farmer's corduroys unfolded from a corner seat in the smoking room of the Penygwryd Hotel, swayed upright, from a great height extended a hand down towards me, informing me in precise, measured, booming tones as I took it: "You shake the hand that shook the hand of William Butler Yeats." Then, Kevin FitzGerald dissolved into a wheezing chuckle, pulled me down to sit beside him, and teased, pricked and reminisced over an extraordinary range of conversational topics grass husbandry, Cardinal Newman, Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature, Ireland during the original Troubles, rugby and mountaineering as metaphors for life, Mrs Thatcher and women's suffrage traduced on and on enchantingly into the small hours of the morning. Thus was my introduction to Kevin FitzGerald, and if in any way he sounds pompous I do him a disservice. The parody of Browning was pitched at a level of self-mockery. Kevin took nothing about himself and very little about his fellow humans other than their capacity for cruelty and self-delusion at all seriously. Behind the grave facade of Kevin Columba men whose sanctity wasn't widely accepted at the time of my FitzGerald was a mischievous Irish spirit of irreverence.

He was once bearded in his club, the Athenaeum, in front of a fellow member by some mountaineering pundit on the make who had contrived an invitation there for himself: "I see what you are, Kevin you're a typical member of the Establishment, Kevin." "Good Lord, Kevin!" exclaimed the fellow member, rising to his defence. "The Establishment's not going to like this While it may not have relished the idea of his typicality, it csrtainly enjoyed his character. He spoke as people no longer speak, or perhaps have never spoken in grave, parenthetical perorations through which, as hyperbole mounted, upon comic hvnerbole. the real- isation slowly grew that his natural bent was tor the mock-heroic, that his whole intent was to hold up the clearest, gentlest mirror to human pretension and folly. He was drawn, therefore, to that most presumptuous and egotistical of human activities, mountaineering, about which he left a small body of essays lovely hills are very "Meet me on the Miners' and "The Assault on Slab to celebrate easy companionship, incompetence and the lack of all difficulty and motivation.

Utterly subversive, they are so charmingly performed that there was never the slightest possibility of their gently mocked objects taking offence. But that was the slightest part of his life's output, proud though he was of it. Somerset Maugham had introduced him to Heinemann in the thirties with the recommendation, "He's no novelist, but by God! he can tell a story." So stories he Death notices BAYLEY Harold Marcon On Novamber 22, 1993. peacefully, al homo, Harold Marcon, aged 9t. headmaster of Ayleslord House School.

St Albans, from 1933-57, darling father of Elise. Mike and Elaine, and dearly loved uncle and grandfather. Funoral at Ibstone Church on Monday, November 29, at 12 30 pm. Family flowers only, donations, if desired, to Savo The Children or CPRE, co funeral directors Sutman and Horwood, 25 High Street, Princes Risborough HP27 OAE. BOOKBINDER Maty Patricia (nee O'Don-nell).

Died at 3 am on Wednesday, November 24. 1993, alter a long and brave light against cancer. She is irreplaceable to her lamily, Oavid, Susan and John, and to her mother Mary and sister Margaret. Funeral Wednesday, December 1. 1993, at Markoaton ting beyond ideology is an exciting ideal whose time may well have come, now that most of the big old "isms" from communism to Thatcherism are discredited.

Jones wants also to free us from the "social fallacy" of imagining that society has norms and that individual minds are sick if they don't conform. People in the grip of this fallacy are "preoccupied with fixing things out there, the mind in here only requiring attention when it fails to do things. One's mind is a private matter unless it become a public nuisance." He says the social fallacy "implies not only a mindfeelings split, but also as total a separation as possible of the personal from the Jones's claim that Buddhism is a social religion, better suited than Christianity for bringing us back to basics, was endorsed long ago by Fritz Schumacher In 1924 she made a film a month. Eventually she was signed on a long-term contract by Harry Cohn, with whom she embarked on an equally long-term affair. (She also bleached her hair, which transformed her appearance.) Cohn was a former Vaudeville song-plugger who had started a company called CBC known as Corned Dorothy Revier actress with realise that what Africa was really about was not landscape or animals, but the politics of human relationships.

I last saw Emma on Tuesday night at the new home she had shared with Riak in Nairobi for just a week. It was the first taste of domestic bliss she had had with her loving husband, apart from a string of colour-fully decorated thatched huts in southern Sudan. In one, she. found a picture of herself de- Birthdays A DESCENDANT of a royal family in the Ibo tribe of Nigeria, abandoned on King's Cross station when he was nine, life was always a succession of hurdles for Kriss Akabusi, who is 35 tomorrow. So when he contemplated 10 of them on a running track, Akabusi had the strength, heart and faith to progress from novice to Olympic medal winner quicker than anyone else with the exception of Ed Moses.

He was a physical training instructor in the Army for 15 years, with the rank of warrant officer when he left in 1990. That was the year of his athletic peak, winning the European title in Split and breaking David Hemery's British 400 metres hurdles record. He was to run faster, take an Olympic bronze in Barcelona, but Split was the top of his athletic mountain. Now retired from the track, he pursues promotional work, and the Christian faith as an occasional nrpnnhnr in his church at Southampton. Athletics does not want to lose him; he would have been the ideal motivator as team captain.

He should A recent book by another guru, Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, also dwelt on "the nature of as opposed to the ordinary everyday mind imprisoned in sensation and passion. Sogyal Rinpoche identified this quintessential mind with the Christian God, the Hindu Self, Shiva, Brahman or Vishnu, and the Sufis' hidden essence. This suggests a Buddhist contribution to the debate among Christians between believers in a God "out there" and those who say he exists only in our minds. And the Buddhist notion of reincarnation is surely no harder to swal her deeply. Emma admitted that the Upper Nile was hot and inhospitable and among the most unhealthy of African environments.

But she liked the people and understood their culture well. Earlier this year, she began work on a book about the story of her life with Riak. It starts with a poignant account of her own experience of being under attack by Garang's forces in March this year. Emma, who Was recovering'. Beef and Cabbage for the quality of its product and fighting his way up Poverty Row, he won for it a reputation under the new name of Columbia Pictures.

By the time sound arrived, he had Frank Capra working for him, and was turning out some first-class films. Dorothy Revier was thus in the right place at the right time, with the right man behind the easy grace of a dancer ing about the Dalai Lama's public success last summer, which owed more to his infectious smile, his anti-celebrity personality and his simplistic message of love-conquers-all than to any deeper analysis. was more impressed by a younger, English Buddhist whose lecture 1 went to in Hampstead: Thubten Gyatso, described as the only British Tantric master. The hall was packed. There was neither entrance fee nor collection.

The guru was neither pious, populist nor academic but quite often jovial and self-deprecating. He began by saying you don't have to be a Buddhist to Catherine Bond Emma McCune-Machar, born February 3, 1964, died November 24, 1993. return to the sport in team management within a couple of years. J.R. Today's birthays: John Alder-ton, actor, 53; Prof John Ash-worth, director, London School of Economics, 55; Rodney Bewes, actor, 56; Randy Brecker, jazz musician, 48; Robert Doug all, former newscaster, 80; Dr Kim Howells, Labour MP, 47; Rosaline Kelly, publishing consultant, 71; Verity Lambert, television and film producer, 58; Baroness (Ann) Mallalieu, QC, 48; Sir David Nickson, chairman, Scottish Enterprise, 64; Leslie Preston, architect, 90; Alan Simpson, scriptwriter, 64; David Waller, actor, 73; Ernie Wise, comedian, 68.

Tomorrow's other birthdays: Gato Barbieri, saxophonist, 60; Dr Gordon Beveridge, vice-chancellor. Queen's University, Belfast, 60; Rita Mae Brown, novelist, 49; Geoffrey Clarke, artist and sculptor, 69; Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Irish poet and lecturer, 51; Cecilia Colledge, former ice skater, 73; Alistair Darling, Labour MP, 40; Terence Frisby, actor and playwright, 61; Lucy Gutter-idge, actress, 37; Bernard Kops, poet and playwright, 67; Enid Lakeman, editorial consultant, Electoral Reform Society, 90; Hope Lange, actress, 62; Prof Claude Levi-Strauss, social anthropologist, 85; Keith Miller, cricketer, 74; Dervla Murphy, travel writer, 62; Randy Newman, singer, songwriter, 50; Stephen Roche, former cycling champion, 34; Randolph Stow, novelist and poet, 58; Mike Walker, football manager, 48. low by rational minds than the Trinity or bodily resurrection. Now comes a new Buddhist contribution to ecological and ethical thought. Ken Jones's Beyond Optimism, which takes us back yet again to the liberation of the mind.

He wants especially to free us from ideologies, including the naive and aggressive excesses of "green" thinking. Ken Jones wants a revolution bringing in a libertarian Green society "stripped of its ideology and romanticism more serviceable with the way things are, including the kind of people we tend to be." His proposal for unilateral ideological disarmament should attract Christians since it is the intellectual equivalent of turning the other cheek, but it has obvious problems. Jones doesn't make clear how we can intelligently live without ideology, nor how socially-aware Buddhism itself manages not to be an ideology. But get Row Cameraman Joe Walker was offered a picture by Cohn on the basis of his success with Dorothy; "Make her look good and you've got the job," Cohn told him, "but if she doesn't, you're out." Cohn strung Dorothy along by promising to divorce his wife, but never seemed to get round to it, so she eventually walked out on him. At the height of her career at the end of the twenties she was playing for directors such as Raoul Walsh and Frank Capra, and was cast as Milady deWinter in Douglas Fair-banks's The Iron Mask (1929).

"Dorothy is very beautiful," wrote a fan magazine, "not merely pretty in the fatuous manner of magazine cover girls, but really beautiful with haunting grey eyes and mobile lips that droop a little sadly in repose, but are usually curled upwards in amusement. She has the easy grace of a dancer: nothing flamboyant or showily dramatic about her, just a tremendously effective economy of movement." Her beauty became so famous that her name was used for a brand of skin preparations. She left films in the late thirties, still very young, and lived quietly in Hollywood, painting and writing poetry, with her second husband, William Pelayo. Kevin Brownlow Doris Velegra (Dorothy Revier), born 1904; died November 19, 1993. train your mind, which is "potentially to be free from the static which interferes and causes all your problems and those of people who have to put up with your behaviour.

Many psychiatrists might endorse his definition of enlightenment as mind freed from clutter (or neurosis) by guided meditation. This is also freedom from greed and consumerism and from the urge to be a joyrider or to mug old ladies. Many people think of Buddhism as passive, inward-looking and self-centred but Thibten Gyatso claimed a Buddhist's basic motivation in all his successive lives was the desire to help others. POVERTY Row, in Hollywood in the silent days, referred to a group of studios which specialised in low-budget productions. They were known as "programme pictures" and Dorothy Revier made many of them bearable.

"She has the face of Norma Shearer and the eyes of Gloria Swanson," said a fan magazine in 1925. "If only Valentino would make her his leading lady!" But there were far too many exceptionally beautiful women and first-rate actresses in Hollywood at the time, and it was a long, hard haul from Poverty Row to a top studio. Dorothy Revier was born Doris Velagra in San Francisco. Her mother was English, her father from Italy. An aunt, Ida Velagra, was a great singer in Adelina Patti's time.

She made her first public appearance as a dancer at the age of six, and joined a touring Russian ballet company run by Alia Moskova. Homesickness caused her to return to San Francisco and she became a headliner at the exclusive Tait's Cafe. She was cast in a film made at a studio near San Mateo, Life's Greatest Question (1921), directed by Harry Revier. She thought she was awful, but she fell for the director and married him. (A charming hustler with a French accent, he had made the early Tarzan films.) She returned to Tait's until her contract expired, then she found herself at Universal Pictures in Hollywood, typed as a vamp, in films like A Wild Party (1923).

Face to Faith Back to Walter Sohwarx BACK to basics isn't getting off the ground, so where can we look for guidance and inspiration? Not the Government, which has been identified for a decade and a half with aggressive competition and relentless market forces. The only ringingly clear return to basics has been the Pope's Veritatis Splendor, but John Paul H's encyclical is flawed, too, with its sexual morality rejected as cruelly irrelevant by much if not most of his world-wide flock, and its concept of authority resented even basics, or liberation of the mind? more. The Government looks rather to the Church of England for help but gets very little. Whenever the Archbishop of Canterbury feels it is time to inject a judicious dose of basic morality into public dicusssion about every other week on average he feels obliged to chide the Government as often as its sinning subjects. So help, here, comes once a month, at most.

There is advice at hand from the unlikeliest quarter. An insistent Buddhist voice is heard in Britain, socially committed yet empirical in political approach, undogmatic in theology and refreshingly modern in its terminology. I am not talk.