¹ The British Museum.

² The utopian social reformer Samuel Hartlib (1600?–1662), whose voluminous archive, now in the Hartlib Centre at the University of Sheffield, is an invaluable record of the European intellectual community of his time.

¹ The rebellion, a prelude to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, led by Sir George Booth in 1659. The papers were in fact found in 1933.

² Lord Delamere actually lived in Kenya. George Turnbull (1879–1961), Professor of Education at Sheffield University 1922–54, pioneered the study of Hartlib, on whom T-R wrote an essay which appeared in Encounter in February 1960 and reappeared as ‘Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution’ in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change.

³ Correctly, Harry Green Armytage (1915–98), Professor of Education at Sheffield 1954–82, author of A Social History of Engineering (1961), a history of English utopianism, and other works.

⁴ ‘Piyo’ Rattansi, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, from 1996.

⁵ Charles Webster, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Reader in the History of Medicine (1972–88) and Fellow of All Souls 1988–2004, edited, not the Ephemerides, but extracts from Hartlib’s writings on education (Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning, 1970). Hartlib is a central figure in Webster’s The Great Instauration (1975).

⁶ He did go, as part of a group sent by the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, taking the place of Maurice Bowra, who had been advised by his doctor not to undertake such a strenuous trip.

¹ Valerie Pearl was interested in the Civil War journalist John Dillingham’s relations with Oliver Cromwell’s cousin Oliver St John.

² T-R subjected the volume of Christopher Hill’s Ford Lectures, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), to a critical review in the journal History and Theory.

³ Lawrence Stone (1919–99) had been an undergraduate pupil of T-R’s at Christ Church, and then a don at Wadham, before leaving for Princeton where he was Dodge Professor of History 1963–90. In the early 1950s there had been an acrimonious public exchange between the two men in the pages of the Economic History Review, and thereafter they were regarded as enemies.

⁴ Hill’s Economic Problems of the Church had been published in 1956.

⁵ George Buchanan (1506–82), scholar, poet, and political theorist, was tutor to King James VI of Scotland. Buchanan’s account of the ancient Scottish constitution was dissected by T-R in a 1966 article in the English Historical Review and in T-R’s posthumous The Invention of Scotland (2008).

¹ Gertrude Himmelfarb Kristol (b. 1922), an American historian of Victorian virtues and ideas. Her letter of 25 August 1965 described how ‘respectable “liberal” historians and philosophers’ had responded to her essay: ‘they were properly appalled by the Panopticon, impressed by its importance in Bentham’s life and thought, and yet entirely unwilling to amend their conventional view of Bentham, Benthamism, or “Benthamite reforms”.’

² Fritz Fischer (1908–99) argued in Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (1961: published in English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War) that Germany had deliberately instigated a European war in 1914 in an attempt to become a world power.

³ Gerhard Ritter (1888–1967), Professor of History at Freiburg 1925–56, was a conservative and monarchist who issued furious rebuttals of Fischer’s book.

⁴ The medievalist Percy Schramm (1894–1970), Professor of History at GÖttingen 1929–63, was official wartime historian of the Wehrmacht and wrote a contentious introduction to a German edition of Hitler’s Table-Talk.

¹ T-R first encountered the fraudster Robert Peters, né Parkins (b. 1918), in 1958, and kept a dossier on him, which was compiled from accounts supplied by correspondents around the world. Peters’s activities entertained T-R by exposing the gullibility of academic and religious institutions.