This week: a maverick historian and a popular DJ

THE historian John Lukacs, who has died aged 95, was a maverick who brooded over the future of Western civilization, wrote a best-selling tribute to Winston Churchill, and produced a substantial and often despairing body of writings on the politics and culture of Europe and the United States.

In a profession where liberals were a clear majority, he was sharply critical of the left and of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. But he was also unhappy with the modern conservative movement, opposing the Iraq war, and disliking the “puerile” tradition, apparently started by Ronald Reagan, of presidents returning military salutes from the armed forces.

Lukacs completed more than 30 books, on everything from his native country to 20th century American history to the meaning of history itself. His books include Five Days in London, the memoir Confessions of an Original Sinner, and Historical Consciousness, in which he contended that the best way to study any subject, whether science or politics, was through its history.

Hitler and Stalin were Lukacs’ prime villains, Churchill his hero. Lukacs wrote several short works on Churchill’s leadership during the Second World War, focusing on his defiant “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech as the Nazis were threatening England in May 1940. Lukacs wrote that the speech was at first not well received and that instead of having a unified country behind him, Churchill had to fight members of his own cabinet who wanted to make peace with the Nazis.

“If at that time a British government had signalled as much as a cautious inclination to explore a negotiation with Hitler, amounting to a willingness to ascertain his possible terms, that would have been the first step onto a Slippery Slope from which there could be no retreat,” Lukacs wrote in Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian, published in 2002. “But Churchill did not let go; and he had his way.”

The historian was born Lukacs Janos Albert in Budapest. Lukacs had a Catholic father and Jewish mother, making him technically a Jew, although he was a practising Catholic for much of his life. For the Nazis, who occupied Hungary in 1944, being half a Jew was enough to be sent to a labour camp.

By the end of 1944, he was a deserter from the Hungarian army labour battalion, hiding in a cellar, awaiting liberation by Russian troops. Within months of living under Soviet control, he fled the country on a “dirty, broken-down train” to Austria. In 1946, he arrived by ship in Portland, Maine, his youthful affinity for communism shattered.

Lukacs was a visiting professor at Princeton University, Columbia University and other prominent schools, but spent much of his career on the faculty of the lesser-known Chestnut Hill College, a Catholic school (all girls until 2003) in Philadelphia where he taught from 1946-1994. He was married three times (his first two wives died) and had two children.

THE DJ Adam Neat, who has died aged 42, was a popular performer on the Asian club circuit and had toured with artists including Taio Cruz and The Scissor Sisters.

The Australian was well known on the international dance scene and had shared the stage with other DJs such as Fat Boy Slim and Paul Oakenfold. He also toured with the Ministry of Sound.

Neat also hosted a radio show, Guestlist Radio, which has more than a million monthly listeners around the world.

He was found dead after suffering massive bleeding from an injury at a resort complex on the Indonesian island of Bali. Indonesian police said they were still investigating the death of the performer, who used the stage name Adam Sky. An initial police report said he suffered a deep, wide cut to his arm that caused massive bleeding.