Erik Blegvad was a Danish-born artist celebrated for his whimsical illustrations in more than 100 children's books. He worked as a commercial illustrator and developed a sophisticated pen-and-ink style that seemed perfectly suited for children's books.

In the male-dominated world of architecture, Kathryn Findlay overcame obstacles and persevered, through the highs and lows, including bankruptcy, with her unconventional designs and avant-garde style, to leave a body of inspirational work, buildings characterised by their fusion of creativity and practicality.

Born in an earlier era, the tall, firm-jawed Christopher Malcolm might have become better known – a North American tough guy in Britain, starring in black-and-white B-movie thrillers, playing Western heroes on radio or doing the voices for a Gerry Anderson series.

Impish and furtive are words that spring to mind when remembering the many comedy performances of the ubiquitous Ken Jones. He was a gift for casting directors, always able to add a mischievous twinkle to a scene, frequently playing incompetent little devils whose ambition in life was little more than to be a spiv.

Tall, long-haired and beautiful, Samantha Juste was one of the faces of the swinging Sixties through her appearances on the television show Top of the Pops, a fleeting attempt at a singing career, and her subsequent marriage to Micky Dolenz of the Monkees in 1968.

Ralph Waite, who has died at the age of 85, was an actor who played the kind and steady patriarch of a tight-knit rural Southern family in the television series The Waltons. The gentle family drama, set in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, went out in the US on CBS from 1972 to 1981, starring Waite as John Walton, with Richard Thomas playing his oldest son, John-Boy, an aspiring novelist.

Cherished by Doctor Who fans for regularly upping the programme's fear factor, the television director Christopher Barry was, in truth, much happier far away from alien worlds and telling unsensational stories of everyday Earth folk. He ploughed a furrow fashionable at the time of low-key human drama, tales of wartime nannies, rustic vets and bobbies on the beat. He was one of the first BBC staff directors who hadn't come from the theatre, instead being poached from the world of film before he had had a chance to make one of his own, but despite television thwarting his real ambition, he dedicated his working life to it, in loyal service as an efficient and trustworthy small-screen journeyman, casting creatively and directing with composure.

Matt Schudel

The sudden death of Mark Bennett from a heart attack at the age of 44 has robbed both local government and the gay movement of a high profile campaigner. But it was as a junior civil servant that he came closest to the centre of power. In 1997, he went to work at 10 Downing Street, the only man in the famous garden room staffed by women who normally acted as administrative and secretarial support to the prime minister of the day. Tony Blair, with whom he worked closely during those early days at No 10, said: "He was intelligent, immensely hard-working and above all, a warm and generous spirit who was a pleasure to be around."

A footballing prince among men was how one enraptured newspaperman described Andy Paton of Motherwell in the immediate postwar years as the multi-talented Ayrshireman emerged as one of the most cultured yet commanding centre-halves the Scottish game had known. It was a verdict with which the Fir Park faithful concurred enthusiastically at the time, and they had not changed their minds more than half a century later in 2007, when Paton was voted the greatest player to grace the Steelmen's claret and amber colours.

Pamela Vandyke Price embarked upon a career of writing about wine at a time when it was still an unusual thing for a woman to do. "She was the first woman to write seriously about wine in Britain [and] did more than most to popularise wine after the Second World War," says her entry in Jancis Robinson's Oxford Companion to Wine, which continues: "She is probably most distinguished as a performer, however, having trained initially as an actress." She was also a woman of strong dislikes; a portion of her final years was spent drawing up a list of those who were not to be asked to her funeral.

To speak of a life ending on a note of triumph sounds a little odd. And yet this was the case with the poet Sebastian Barker, who died of a cardiac arrest at the age of 68 within a day and a half of participating in a reading in celebration of the publication of Land of Gold, his new book of poetry, in Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge. That night, whether reading his own poems or answering questions fired from the choir stalls by friends and relatives about how and why poems get written, he had seemed –and sounded – astonishingly robust, confident, fearlessly exuberant, and future-facing, in spite of the fact that almost all who were listening knew that he was suffering from untreatable lung cancer.

Tom Finney was a national footballing treasure and a perfect gentleman, a gifted, wholesome, universally popular figure who stood for all that was best about his beloved game, both on the field and off it. Though it embarrassed him to be the subject of such lavish praise, it was a widely held opinion that, for most of the decade and a half which separated the Second World War from the social watershed of the 1960s, he was the most complete all-round forward in the world.

Ian McNaught-Davis was a mountaineer and broadcaster who became a pioneer in two very different fields. As a climber, he was part of the team that was the first to surmount the extremely challenging Muztagh Tower in Pakistan in 1956.

‘She won people over with her openness, mildness and honesty,’ said the Dutch PM