Then in 1989 he succumbed to the mania of the time and bought Thistle hotels from Scottish & Newcastle for pounds 645m.Interest rates doubled and Sir Ron Brierley swooped. The New Zealander bought the company, but Robert survived as chief executive.Sir Ron in turn was ejected from Brierley Investments, which still owns 70 per cent of Thistle, the rest going to the Singapore government. Robert will still oversee the "Thistle-isation" of the group's acquisitions after the float, while brother Charlie has his own stockbroking house, Peel Hunt.Robin Hall, managing director of CINven, is still smarting after his beloved Arsenal's 3-2 defeat at the hands of Borussia Monchengladbach this week.He's attempted to cheer himself up by hiring a new director, four new investment managers and a marketing manager for the venture capital group.Since the management of CINven bought out the company from British Coal last October it has broadened its business, says Mr Hall. The firm needs new blood for its spanking new Old Broad Street offices in the City.Along with a new pounds 200m buyout fund which CINven is raising comes this clutch of appointments. The new director is Yagnish Chotai, currently deputy managing director of Gresham Trust.The four investment managers, all qualified accountants and all under 30, are: David Barker, senior financial analyst with Morgan Crucible; Stuart McAlpine, who moves from the acquisition finance arm of Royal Bank of Scotland; Gordon Moore, formerly a corporate financier with SBC Warburg; and Dominic Murphy, who was an investment executive at 3i.. The troubled life of Rose Williams haunts the works of her brother Tennessee. Like a faded Southern belle eternally deserted, she is the model for the withdrawn, disabled "Laura Wingfield" who seeks refuge in her collection of glass animals in The Glass Menagerie.

Her brother Tom declares, "Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!" Rose Isabel Williams was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1909, the first child of Edwina and Cornelius Williams Her brother Thomas - Tennessee - was born three years later. The siblings became as close as twins; as Lyle Leverich writes in his admirable Tom: the unknown Tennessee Williams (1995), "Throughout his life, Tennessee Williams had two overriding devotions: his career as a writer and his sister, Rose." Initially proud of his daughter with her "expressive grey-green" eyes and auburn curls, their father later turned against his two elder children; his relationship with his wife also deteriorated, and her resultant bias against sex had a serious effect on Rose and Tom, "that of deep and permanent injury. He was also very doubtful about his ability to hold on to it at the moment the parachute opened. William Moyce was born in Brockley, south-east London, in 1913. It was fortunate that this proved unnecessary, for, as he recalled later, he had never made a parachute jump and it was his first flight in an aeroplane. This was without doubt the most valuable object in the country - Sellafield and Aldermaston had been built to make it - and there was natural concern about its safe-keeping.

Moyce was told that if during the flight out it looked as though the RAF plane was going to crash, he was to clutch the container in his arms, bail out and descend by parachute. Bill Moyce was an important member of the team that built and tested Britain's first atomic bombs in the late 1940s and early 1950s and he remained at Aldermaston in a variety of senior positions all his career. He was a versatile scientist and an able manager, but he was perhaps most notable for his unflappability and for his good- humour, qualities tested to the limit in those early atomic days. In 1952, for example, it was Moyce who was chosen to fly out to Australia with the plutonium core which was to be used in the first British nuclear test.

With her death, the university will receive $7m.Rose Isabel Williams: born Gulfport, Mississippi 19 November 1909; died Tarrytown, New York 5 September 1996.Elegy for RoseShe is a metal forged by lovetoo volatile, too fiery thinso that her substance will be lostas sudden lightning or as wind.And yet the ghost of her remainsreflected with the metal gone,a shadow as of shifting leavesat moonrise or at early dawn.A kind of rapture never quitepossessed again, however longthe heart lays siege upon a ghostrecaptured in a web of song.Tennessee Williams. Williams's estate was left to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with the bulk remaining in trust for his sister during her lifetime. Post-lobotomy, he found her "possessed of an unbridled imagination, and from then on it would bid them. ." His own obsession with mental illness remained with him as Suddenly Last Summer (1958), its heroine also facing insanity, bears witness; as Leverich writes, "He knew that Rose's reality was never far removed from his own."Tennessee's success with A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 allowed him to finance his sister's private care, and up until his death (he choked on a bottle cap) in 1983, Tennessee continued to pay for her upkeep, whilst intermittently blaming his mother (who died aged 94 in 1979) for having allowed the operation.