It is the story of a young Spanish officer who elects to die for the liberation of Venezuela rather than betray the whereabouts of the great liberator Simon Bolivar. This play had an immense success and was played all over the world.His next play, La Verit est morte (1952) received its first performances at the Comdie Franaise. In the same year, his novel a s'appelle l'aurore appeared and was eventually (in 1956) made into a film by Luis Buuel, one of this first Franco-Italian co-productions. Robls was always a great traveller, first as a journalist and then as a man of letters in demand as a lecturer. This is reflected in the variety of settings in his novels: Mexico in Les Couteaux (1956), Japan in L'Homme d'avril (1959), Italy in Un Printemps d'Italie (1970) and Venise en hiver (1980).Norma ou l'exil infini (1988) is about the moral dilemma of an Argentinian exile in Paris during the Falklands war, torn between his loyalty to a land ruled by a military dictatorship and his admiration for Britain that is itself employing military force against his countrymen.

It is an admirable novel whose dramatic tension never relaxes and which states clearly the author's humanist and pacifist stand. Robls' last published work before his death was L'Herbe des ruines (1992) in which he again castigates the folly of war in a terrifying description of the Allied air forces' annihilation of Pforzheim, an experience as devastating as Dresden's.In Venise d'hiver, Robls had already written a fine love- story against a background of the Red Brigades' terrorist attacks in Italy. He had personal experience of terrorist violence in Algeria, and one of the young French-Algerian writers he had been encouraging and publishing in France in the Seuil series "Mediterrane" which he directed was Tahar Djaout, assassinated in May 1993 at Birmandreis. Robls had first met him a few years before on the occasion of an international conference in Oran dedicated to the work of Albert Camus.Just one week before Robls died, he took the corrected proofs of his final work to the editorial offices of Seuil, a tribute to his friendship with Camus entitled Camus: frre de soleil, which is dedicated "to the memory of Tahar Djaout, brother of the sun".James Kirkup.

Gwilym Iwan Jones, colonial administrator and anthropologist; born Cape Town 3 May 1904; married 1939 Ursula Whittall (three sons, one daughter); died King's Lynn 25 January 1995. Gwilym Iwan ("G.I.") Jones was a colonial administrator, anthropologist, and leading scholar of the art of Eastern Nigeria. A university lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College, he was an ethnographer in the classic mould, painstaking in the collection of data, rigorous in his analysis, displaying the knowledge and insight of one who had true empathy with the peoples of Eastern Nigeria, with whom he had worked for so long. Born in South Africa in 1904, an Anglican clergyman's only son, Jones soon acquired a taste for travel. He spent his early childhood in Chile before returning to England in 1915. Educated at St John's, Leatherhead, its ethos of Spartan Christianity reinforced by wartime conditions, he became friends with the future poet Geoffrey Grigson. Then, as always, his own man, he acquired something of a reputation for unconventionality, insisting on studying history despite the school's classical tradition, his waywardness being vindicated when he won a scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1923.

As an undergraduate, he defied classification as either hearty or aesthete, achieving distinction in the History Schools and playing rugby on the wing for London Welsh.He was endowed by his education with the spirit of service, and by his peripatetic childhood with the spirit of adventure, and the colonial service, which he joined in 1926, was a natural choice for his future career. He served as an Assistant District Officer in Eastern Nigeria, later becoming a District Officer in Bende and adjacent divisions of Owerri Province.An exemplary officer, administering a sizeable district single-handed, Jones took a particular interest in the integration of indigenous and centralised forms of government, frequently championing the interests of local people against the more bureaucratic concerns of the central administration. His determination to understand the ethnically diverse, and ever-changing, cultures of Eastern Nigeria led him to acquire the Certificate in Anthropology at Oxford.His realisation that these cultures were undergoing dramatic changes, particularly with regard to traditional ritual, led him to take a course in photography. The result, his photographic archive of Ibo and Ibibio masquerades, provides a unique record of a central institution in the life of Eastern Nigeria in the 1930s He later joined with K.C.