Today's Guardian has a really lovely obituary for Sydney, by fellow pacifist Canon Paul Oestreicher.

It brings out the range of his songs, and of the quality of his other writing. The most moving passage for me came when Oestreicher touched on the last phase of Sydney's life:

"When, in 1999 the mists of Alzheimer's disease began to close in, Sydney's second wife, Leela, lovingly cared for him and interpreted him to others. The past gradually receded into the strange land of lost memory. His friend Rabbi Lionel Blue wrote that now "our only contact is a thin thread of memory and his songs. I start singing them, and he joyfully joins in - and I leave him as he continues singing."

And he quotes what he describes as Sydney's "own epitaph, written more than 30 years ago:

Coming and going by the dance, I see
That what I am not is a part of me.
Dancing is all that I can ever trust,
The dance is all I am, the rest is dust.
I will believe my bones and live by what
Will go on dancing when my bones are not.