(Photo: Daily Telegraph)

Call me morbid but one of the first sections I turn to in newspapers, particularly in the UK, is the Obituaries page – yes, I like to read about dead people.

There’s an art to obituary writing and I feel what is written about someone in death speaks more volumes about them than what is written when they are alive. For some reason, we human beings feel more comfortable expressing stuff after someone can no longer hear us than when they are still near and dear to us.

While I was in the UK, two deaths caught my attention.

One was Lord WF Deedes, hailed as Fleet Street’s finest and a man I tried to read whenever I got the chance through his columns in The Daily Telegraph.

By coincidence, during the weekend in Cardiff, I had picked up his book from my friend’s overflowing bookshelves. “Brief Lives” is a collection of his biographical sketches of British political heavyweights such as Anthony Eden and Ramsay MacDonald and world-famous figures such as Sir Edmund Hillary, Imelda Marcos and Ian Smith.

Unfortunately I only had time to get through one chapter – a lighter portrait of Noel Coward in which he paints the picture of a man who was more confident about the subject of trains than he was on the subject of play writing.

Deedes also wrote “War on Waugh” – he is known to have inspired one of Evelyn Waugh’s most celebrated characters, the bumbling but resourceful William Boot, in his novel, Scoop. Deedes and Waugh met in Abyssinia in 1935, while covering the war.

I liked his clarity and simplicity. He did not preach. He took you along with his words. And in very few words, he said a lot. Reading Deedes, you felt like you were sitting by the fireplace, listening to your grandfather tell you stories.

And when you considered what he had seen and reported on – his journalism career spanned more than 70 years and he was in the middle of writing a column when he died on August 18 at the age of 97 – his was truly an extraordinary life.

I thus devoured every morsel that was written about him.

Fighting as a young lieutenant in World War Two, he wrote to his wife, “I can’t give you any news really. In fact, I’d like to say nothing about it but will tell you all about it later. Oh these damn papers which pretend the whole thing is over. By golly, it’s not. Lots of 16-year-olds keen to die for Hitler.”

The Economist described him as “Modest, curious and experienced—a vanishing breed in journalism”.

Describing him as above all, a journalist, it said, “Writing and reporting, of the kind Deedes relished, are less valued now than once they were, at least by the media industry. A newspaper report from a war zone may not, it's true, have all the immediacy of a live television feed, or even the spontaneity of an unmediated blog.

“And it's true, too, that many a pundit can sit in an office and, after a good lunch with a diplomat, hammer out 600 cogent words. Yet columns unsupported by reporting tend to lack vitality and authority.

“By contrast, a well-turned column from the spot has a quality all its own, especially when the author can bring a lifetime of personal experience to his aid. This Deedes could do, comparing the Darfur before his eyes as he typed, say, with the German concentration camps he had seen 60 years before.”

But it was words from his memoir, “Dear Bill”, that struck me most. “We go this way only once, and there seems to be so little in which to explore the world and its wonders, to find out more about the human tragedy – or, as I more often find it, the human comedy – of which we are part. “Never forget,” the Austrian poet Rilke said to his wife, as he lay dying, “life is magnificent” and that is right. I believe there is a future life, but I do not let that discourage me from trying to get the most out of this one.”

From what I read, Lord Deedes certainly didn’t.

On the other end of the spectrum, the other obituary I read with some interest was that of Leona Helmsley. Remember her of the “I was the first woman to put a photo of myself in my hotel advertisement” fame?

The product of a “poor girl who married rich man” story – her husband Harry Helmsley was known as the King Kong of Big Apple real estate – she who took over his hotel business in the 1980s and became famous (or infamous) through putting her face on her own advertisements. In one, she posed in a tiara outside the Palace Hotel, the only such establishment “where the Queen stands guard”.

When her husband died in 1997, she inherited $1.7 billion.

Known as the “Queen of Mean”, she later went to jail for tax evasion and her quote, “only little people pay taxes”, earned her a place in obituary history.

What is clear is, big or little or rich, we all pass on to that big hotel in the sky. Not all, though, get obituaries written about us.