In Passing - James Alan McPherson, Kate Granger, Commander Peter Wippell, Denis Dubourdieu

James Alan McPherson, an author of widely anthologised short stories and essays that both explored and transcended black experiences in America, and who in 1978 became the first black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, died July 27 at a hospice centre in Iowa City. He was 72.The cause was complications from pneumonia, said his daughter, Rachel McPherson. Mr. McPherson's life took him from segregated Georgia, where he grew up in poverty as the son of an alcoholic father, to Harvard Law School during the social upheaval of the 1960s. Uninspired by the legal professional, he became a writer and for a time was mentored by Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man.

Kate Granger, who has died aged 34, was a consultant geriatrician whose terminal cancer diagnosis led her to campaign for a more compassionate National Health Service. "Dying gives you a freedom to speak your mind," she once said. When she spoke her mind, in tweets, talks, a blog and two books, she did so with a compelling frankness. The campaign of which she was proudest came from frustration with some of the hospital staff. The man who told Kate Granger that her cancer was incurable was unable to look at her, and "couldn't leave the room quickly enough".

Commander Peter Wippell, who has died aged 85, devised improvements to the Navy's missile systems that helped Britain win the Falklands War. Wippell also had in hand a number of hardware and software improvements to Sea Slug and Sea Dart, and he compressed their introduction into a few weeks as the prospect of battle loomed: some of this work was completed in the ships on their way to the South Atlantic. Sea Dart was credited with seven confirmed kills, including high- and low-flying aircraft, and that some of these kills were outside Sea Dart's stated technical envelope was attributed to the modifications instigated by Wippell.

Denis Dubourdieu, a scientist, vineyard owner and winemaker who modernised the white wines of Bordeaux and, as a professor of enology at the University of Bordeaux, educated a generation of French vineyard managers, died on Tuesday in Bordeaux. He was 67. The cause was brain cancer, his son Jean-Jacques said. Mr Dubourdieu, often referred to in the French news media as the pope of white wine, or the professor of Bordeaux, owned and managed several estates in Bordeaux, where his family has made wine since the late 18th century.