In his time, Somerset Maugham was the epitome of the “man of letters”. Neither his reputation nor that title have quite the ring they once had, but if any man did most to keep both alive and vital in our time it was Anthony Curtis.

Described as “the Maestro of Rock”, Dick Wagner played soaring lead guitar on several of the albums that defined the Seventies, most famously Lou Reed’s Rock’n’Roll Animal, the landmark live set that reinvented Velvet Underground’s art-rock for FM radio and the hard rock era. Like Reed’s shows at the time, the album kicked off with an extended introduction to “Sweet Jane”, featuring sublime, near-telepathic interplay between Wagner on the right channel and fellow guitarist Steve Hunter on the left, building up to hit the song’s signature riff just as the singer walked on stage to thunderous applause.

Myles Ambrose was a former commissioner of the US Customs Bureau who was named as the federal government’s drug czar during the Nixon administration and who helped organise the Drug Enforcement Administration

Sally Farmiloe was a bit-part actress who suddenly found herself in the spotlight when she was cast in the television series Howards' Way. But she gained more fame later when she had an affair with the novelist and Tory peer Jeffrey Archer.

Julio Grondona was the long-standing, and occasionally controversial, head of the Argentine Football Association. President of the AFA since 1979, he was a powerful ally of Sepp Blatter, President of Fifa, the world game's governing body, who gad recently announced that he would step down next year as head of Fifa's finance committee.

Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk was the last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, hastening the end of the Second World War and forcing the world into the atomic age. He flew 58 bombing missions, but it was a single mission in the Pacific that secured him a place in history.

Ross Burden was the television chef best known for presenting a number of day-time cooking programmes, since becoming a favourite with audiences during the final round of the BBC MasterChef cookery contest, in 1993.

Sir Howard Cooke, for 15 years Jamaica's Governor-General, was the last surviving founding father of the party that propelled the Caribbean island to independence from Britain in 1962. Nicknamed "Teacher" Cooke, he sat on the seven-strong steering committee that set up the People's National Party under the leadership of Jamaica's acknowledged national hero, Norman Washington Manley, in the turbulent year of 1938, a turning point in the island's near-300-year history as a British colony.

The centenarian jazz musician Lionel Ferbos died at his home in New Orleans a few days after celebrating his 103rd birthday on July 17. His ability to read music made him an in-demand musician for gigs that took him to parks, schools, churches, dance halls and even prisons. He also performed at his 102nd birthday party and at every New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival until this year.

Skye McCole Bartusiak was an actress who played Mel Gibson's young daughter in the 2000 film The Patriot. Bartusiak, who had been suffering epileptic seizures, was found unresponsive on her bed by her boyfriend. She had been living in a converted garage apartment at her parents' home in her native Houston.

Warm, debonair, Ray Lonnen was a valuable presence on stage and television, always reliable at playing humane detectives, and precise as a comedy player. His great gift was subtlety, exemplified in his biggest television role, playing undercover army officer Harry Brown, posted to Belfast to hunt down an IRA assassin in YTV's first-class dramatisation of Gerald Seymour's novel Harry's Game (1982). That success made his lack of film roles not only regrettable but baffling.

As chief executive officer of Bear Stearns, Alan "Ace" Greenberg, transformed a small bond shop into the fifth-largest US securities firm before it collapsed in 2008 in one of the key events of the global credit crisis. Greenberg took over the New York-based firm in 1978, when it was a private partnership with about 1,000 employees and $46 million in capital. He expanded shareholders' equity to $1.8 billion, and by 1993, when he handed power to Jimmy Cayne, the company employed 6,300. Greenberg stayed on with Bear Stearns as an equities trader.

"Engineer, philanthropist and optimist" was the description of Andy Garnett given by Frances Lincoln, who published his book on conserving and documenting his meadow. Aside from the engineer ascription, it was a fair summary of an extraordinary character who was the only boy at Eton to convert to Roman Catholicism, who sped around London in a bubble car as a founding member of the London set in the 1950s and who went on to help Jeremy Fry, along with Michael Briggs, to develop the automatic-valve concern, Rotork, into one of the country's most successful small engineering innovation companies, and then did the same with his own company, Radiodetection.

Carlo Bergonzi, the greatest stylist among the postwar generation of tenors, entranced opera lovers in Europe and America for more than 40 years with his golden-toned voice and superlative phrasing. Although as an actor he limited his stage movements to a number of stock gestures, he imbued his vocal performance with such dramatic intensity that acting in the theatrical sense became irrelevant.

Jack Tocco was a Detroit mob boss who was convicted of racketeering in 1998 in a federal crackdown on organised crime. Tocco, whose family had a linen business, grew up in suburban Detroit and repeatedly proclaimed his innocence. Convicted of racketeering and conspiracy to commit extortion in 1998. He served nearly three years in prison and paid $950,000 to the government.