Bimla Bissell, the indispensable and well-connected social secretary to four American ambassadors to India who was a kind of unofficial ambassador herself, a shrewd local guide to the culture and complexities of a sprawling country, died on Jan. 9 at her home in Delhi. She was 92. The cause was complications of diabetes, her daughter, […]

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a long shot cold call to J.R.R. Tolkien’s American publisher with the hope of landing a dream assignment: to create an exhaustive atlas of Middle-earth, the […]

Oliviero Toscani, an Italian photographer who used images of an AIDS patient and death row inmates to break the boundaries of fashion imagery as the creative mastermind of Benetton’s advertising campaigns, died on Monday. He was 82. His death was announced by his family on Instagram. They did not say where he died or cite […]

J. Fraser Stoddart, a Scottish-born scientist who went from playing with construction sets as a boy to building molecular machines a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, known as nanomachines, for which he shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died on Dec. 30 in Melbourne, Australia. He was 82. Alison […]

Mauro Morandi, whose 32-year sojourn on an uninhabited Mediterranean island led to his being known as Italy’s Robinson Crusoe, died on Jan. 3 in Modena, Italy. He was 85. The cause was a brain hemorrhage, said Antonio Rinaldis, who wrote a 2023 book with Mr. Morandi about his life on the island. Unlike Daniel Defoe’s […]

In early 1988, the British neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick found himself drowning in letters from people who believed they had survived an encounter with death. “I slowly floated down a tunnel, not afraid in any way but looking forward to something,” one man wrote to him. “When it came I was absolutely at peace and going […]

Shiu Ka-chun, a former social worker and pro-democracy lawmaker in Hong Kong who devoted his last years to helping protesters imprisoned after a crackdown on dissent, died Friday in Hong Kong. He was 55. His wife, Kelly Hui, said his death, in a hospital, was due to stomach cancer. As a social worker, civil rights […]

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France’s modern political far-right who built a half-century career on rants of barely disguised racism, antisemitism and neo-Nazi propaganda, has died. He was 96. His death was confirmed on X by Jordan Bardella, the current president of the party Mr. Le Pen founded. In a statement to the […]

In his first term, Mr. Simitis set about curtailing Greece’s extravagant public and private spending and sought to prepare the economy to meet European Union targets for his country’s entry into the eurozone. He had succeeded in reducing inflation and public indebtedness while stabilizing the drachma currency. His cautious manner offered a marked contrast with […]

James Lee Williams, a drag performer and winner of the inaugural season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK” who was best known by the stage name The Vivienne, died over the weekend. They were 32. Williams’s death was announced in a statement by their manager, Simon Jones, which did not cite a cause. Williams, who adopted […]