It’s strange the way certain deaths stay in the mind perhaps because of the fascination and interconnection of the lives lived. Jane Lapotaire played Edith Piaf in Britain and then on Broadway. Len Deighton reshaped the classic spy story just as it was being transformed (and gave the world the initially unnamed Cockney spook who took the name Harry Palmer and will forever be associated with Michael Caine who played him in the film). Jürgen Habermas attacked Heidegger who not only praised the Nazis in the 1930s but refused to retract a word of his valorisation of them after the war.

Jane Lapotaire was born to poverty. Her Piaf, the fruit of a crash course in singing, began with an RSC production but ended up garnering Lapotaire a Tony award. Her career included Laurence Olivier giving her a gig at the National in his Merchant of Venice in which he put an unconvincing patina of polish on top of a Cockney voice and Jane Lapotaire played his daughter Jessica in that troubling play where the sounds of the Kaddish are never far away. She also played another French heroine, Shaw’s Saint Joan and she prayed her way in a church into Shaw’s boisterous Maid of Orléans. In some ways she was an improbable choice to play Cleopatra for Jonathan Miller’s 1981 complete BBC Shakespeare and was a sculptured and deliberate Cleopatra even if she lacked the infinite variety of the very greatest contenders in that role.

She did Shadowlands the C.S. Lewis play with Nigel Hawthorne (directed by Australia’s Elijah Moshinsky) and found the stress of the production considerable. Then she gave an extraordinary performance as the mother of Prince Philip, a nun, a saint, an absolutely extraordinary figure in The Crown which convinces you at a stroke that Jane Lapotaire was an actress of genius.

There’s also a BBC Radio recording of her as Sophocles’ Electra which is the finest performance of that great role (arguably as central to the Greek canon as Cleopatra is to the English). Lapotaire is far superior to the recording with Kristin Scott Thomas.

Len Deighton is one of the supreme figures of popular fiction and The Ipcress File – with Michael Caine as Harry Palmer – presented a world as slept in and soiled and as unlike the world of le Carré’s The Spy Wo Came in from the Cold as books in the same genre could be. It’s as if the early Deighton books were a deliberate barricade against the histrionic grandeur of le Carré’s central characterisations and if Deighton couldn’t come at Smiley and Leamas he had a horror of James Bond.

Funeral in Berlin showed how the Deighton variety of spy story could develop in a way that was compatible with a very credible working-class roughness which was paradoxically related to the Michael Ciane figure in Alfie and to the whole tradition of ‘kitchen sink’.

Michael Caine took to Len Deighton like a destiny and everyone who reads the first three books (the ones that were filmed) is liable to become a Deightonite for life. Caine, early on, had done a BBC Hamlet in which he was Horatio to Christopher Plummer’s Prince and he did Zulu in flawless standard English but the Deighton figure is the one that made London English one of the elevated dialects of the tribe. And everyone who fell for Deighton early on will continue to swear to his superiority. They will also attest to the fact that he got better and better.

Len Deighton cooked, designed books, and wrote seriously about the second world war. He remained a Londoner all his days. He contributed massively to the persona of Michael Caine. It’s a mountain of achievement.

Jürgen Habermas was a German philosopher who kept his wits about him. He belonged to the Frankfurt School. In the Fifties, Adorno, no less, asked him to work for him at the Institute for Social Research. He supported Adorno in his dispute with Karl Popper but they eventually fell out. He was committed – contra his comrades – on the necessity for democracy and the glory of the second world war liberation rather than Frankfurt adherents who concentrated on the negative side of capitalism.

He talked about figures on the far left as espousing ‘left wing fascism’ which made him enemies as did his belief that with democratic socialism things got better.

But Habermas knew his Marx, his Weber, he was steeped in the history of philosophy. He accused both Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida of toying with discourse that was beyond what’s ordinarily called thinking.

Late in the piece Habermas (who declared that he had no ear for religion the way you could have no ear for music) became obsessed by the way radically different societies in terms of mythologies and theologies could end up espousing the same ethical systems.

Such reflectiveness and the fact that Habermas died a bit before Easter are a reminder of how we used to cast plays in Australia. As a child I saw Robert Speaight play Thomas More in an Elizabethan Theatre Trust production of A Man for All Seasons. It was a grand bit of casting – quite comparable to Emlyn Williams, the author of Night Must Fall, taking over the Paul Scofield role on Broadway.

Speaight had dazzling credentials. He had created the role of Thomas Becket in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and he had been Jesus in Dorothy L Sayers’ set of radio plays The Man Born to be King. As a young man he had played Hamlet at the Old Vic and he had recorded all of Eliot’s poetry (to the disapproval of F.R. Leavis). An intellectual Catholic he also wrote about theatre. He said Olivier when he did his Othello should have shared the stage with Michael Redgrave as Iago. He said that with a shade more amiability Orson Welles would have been a great Falstaff in Chimes At Midnight, his film of Henry IV.

The other week also saw the death of Country Joe McDonald, a bard of the New Left, who sang ‘What are we fighting for? / Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, / Next stop is Vietnam / And it’s 5, 6, 7 / Open up the pearly gates / Ah, ain’t no time to wonder why / Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.’ He also had a ballad ‘I hunger for your porpoise mouth / And stand erect for love.’

Requiescant.