appresearch 's List: Orbituaries

• one of Britain’s most distinguished orchestra conductors, Sir Edward Downes, had flown to Switzerland last week with his wife and joined her in drinking a lethal cocktail of barbiturates provided by an assisted-suicide clinic.
• the Swiss group Dignitas helped arrange the suicides.
• “Within a couple of minutes they were asleep, and died within 10 minutes,” Caractacus Downes, the couple’s 41-year-old son, said in the interview after his return to Britain.
• “They wanted to be next to each other when they died.” He added, “It is a very civilized way to end your life, and I don’t understand why the legal position in this country doesn’t allow it.”

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• “Europe has lost one of its most important thinkers and intellectuals.”
• As a high school student he had been imprisoned by the Nazis for spreading leaflets opposing the regime, and early in his life he developed a deep suspicion of what he called “closed, encompassing systems.”
• Democracy is “about organizing conflict and living with conflict,” he told an audience at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989.
• “The world isn’t simple, nor should it be simple,” he continued. “It’s rich because it’s complicated. Let’s learn to live with this.”
• “Class and Class Conflict in Civil Society” (1957), which famously proposed the counter-Marxist idea that power, rather than property, defined social class.
• “Society and Democracy in Germany” and “Modern Social Conflict” pursued similar themes.
• “As a scholar he was always addressing human value problems in democracy, especially freedom, but he was also deeply involved in the civic life of Germany,” said Neil J. Smeltser, an emeritus professor of sociology at Berkeley. “He bridged the gap between social theory and social practice as well as anyone I can think of.”
• University of Hamburg, Mr. Dahrendorf studied philosophy and classics, earning a doctorate in philosophy in 1952
• earn a second doctorate, in sociology,
• London School of Economics, where he studied under Karl Popper.
• It was Mr. Popper’s “Open Society” that provided the answers, he once said, to the great questions of modern industrial society posed by Marx.
• held fast to the principles of pluralism and personal freedom. His convictions were Social Democratic with a libertarian spin.
• He favored laws and policies that encouraged personal freedom, a sense of citizenship and a broadening of social, economic and political opportunities.
• Germany’s problems, he argued, stemmed from a belief in absolute answers and in the yearning for an all-powerful leader to put them into effect.
• In 1974 he was invited to become director of the London School of Economics, a post he held for the next decade. He later wrote a history of the school.
• 1987 he accepted the position of warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford.
• He became a British citizen in 1988 and was made a life peer under the name Lord Dahrendorf of Clare Market in the City of Westminster in 1993.

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• Robert Isabell, the floral designer and events planner whose shrewdly lavish aesthetic helped create the buzz around Studio 54 and who made Kennedy weddings and a White House Christmas,
• Mr. Isabell was an events planner before such a thing was common. He was known for imagining an occasion in its entirety — the flowers, of course, but also the location, the décor, the lights, the table settings, the sound — and in the eyes of many of his clients, his skills amounted to artistry.
• Mr. Isabell was considered, in the words of Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, “the king of the event world.”
• “He was the first one that all of New York society went to for a wedding, for a gala, for a private party,” Ms. Wintour said in a telephone interview Friday. “If you could afford him he was a magician. All the great society hostesses — Pat Buckley, Annette de la Renta — used him, and because they used him, all the others wanted to use him.”
• Bruce Robert Isabell — he legally dropped Bruce as an adult — was born in Duluth, Minn., on June 2, 1952. His father, Joseph, was a lineman for the local power company. He worked in a flower shop as a boy, and after high school, moved first to Minneapolis, then to New York in the early to mid-1970s. For a time he worked for the party planner and florist Renny Reynolds, one of whose clients was Studio 54. Recognizing Mr. Isabell’s creativity, Mr. Schrager hired him to create parties on his own.
• By the mid-1980s, Mr. Isabell had started his own company. For a time he operated an independent floral shop in Bergdorf Goodman’s department store, but shortly thereafter, he moved his business downtown to the far West Village in Manhattan, establishing what Joe Heffernan, now the senior account executive for the company, described as “a full-service event-production house.” It has about a dozen full-time employees and has designed events all over the world, from weddings in Saudi Arabia to a casino opening in Macao.

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