THE historian Nancy Hatch Dupree, who has died aged 90, spent decades in Afghanistan working to preserve the heritage of the war-torn country.

An American, she first first went to Afghanistan in 1962 and spent much of her life collecting and documenting historical artefacts.

She amassed a vast collection of books, maps, photographs and even rare recordings of folk music, all now housed at Kabul University, and wrote five guidebooks.

Ms Dupree went to Afghanistan as the wife of a diplomat, but later fell in love with Louis Dupree, an archaeologist and anthropologist.

They married and lived for decades in Afghanistan, visiting historical sites across the country, retracing the footsteps of ancient explorers and documenting it all.

Together they wrote the definitive book on Afghanistan, an encyclopaedic look at the country they had adopted as their own.

Ms Dupree lamented the fact that young people in Afghanistan, many of whom had grown up as refugees in neighbouring countries during decades of unrest, knew little if anything about their history.

“So many young Afghans know more about the histories of the countries where they lived as refugees than their own country’s history,” she said. “It makes me sad because their own history is so rich.”

She singlehandedly raised millions of pounds for the Afghan Centre at Kabul University, where she worked to create an extensive library that could be accessed electronically from universities in Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Mazar-e-Sharif.

She also launched a mobile library programme that took thousands of books, including easy-to-read volumes in Pashto and Dari, to communities across the largely rural country, often on the backs of donkeys.

Many Afghans viewed Ms Dupree as one of their own, and hundreds of people posted condolences on social media. She died in Kabul and is survived by her daughter.

THE former Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov, who has died aged 77, was known in the West for his extraordinary role in averting a nuclear war.

Mr Petrov was on duty at the Soviet military's early warning facility on September 26 1983, when an alarm went off, signalling the launch of US intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The 44-year-old officer had to determine within seconds whether the attack was real.

He decided to consider it a false alarm, which it was.

Speaking in 2013, he said: "All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders - but I couldn't move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.

"Twenty-three minutes later I realised that nothing had happened. If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief."

Mr Petrov died in May but his death has only now become public.

THE architect Albert Speer Jr, who has died aged 83, was the son of Adolf Hitler's chief architect and struggled to distance himself from his father's legacy.

Mr Speer was 12 when his father was convicted in Nuremberg of war crimes and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in an interview in 2010 he was annoyed to always be asked about his father.

"I have tried my whole life to distance myself from my father," he said.

Professionally, Mr Speer concentrated on designing environmentally sound and energy-efficient buildings.

The architecture firm he founded, Albert Speer + Partner GmbH, was selected to design the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.