¹ Brenan’s wife, the American poet and novelist Gamel Woolsey (1895–1968), had recently died of cancer.

¹ T-R’s article ‘Frances Yates, Historian’, in The Listener (18 January 1973) begins: ‘If I were asked whom, among living English historians, I most admire, I should have no difficulty in answering the question. There are many historians whose work I would always read for their insight, their power, their technical virtuosity or their style. But Frances Yates has a gift which transcends all these. It is the power not merely to answer old problems but to discover new, not merely to fill in details, but to reveal a new dimension which alters the whole context.’

² Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), Venetian theologian, anti-papal pamphleteer, and historian of the Council of Trent, who was described by Sir Henry Wotton as ‘a true Protestant in a monk’s habit’.

³ The linguist and lexicographer John Florio (1553–1625) was Giordano Bruno’s friend, and son of a Franciscan friar who became pastor of the Italian Protestants in London.

⁴ The poets Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–99) and Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85).

¹ Moritz Carrière (1817–95), a professor at the University of Munich, wrote an essay on Oliver Cromwell which expressed his own political credo in favour of German unification. Berenson admired his Aesthetik (1859) and Die Kunst im Zusammenhang der Kulturentwicklung and der Ideale der Menschheit (1877).

² From letter 60 of Jerome: ‘when he sees his grandfather, let him jump into his lap, hang on his neck, and sing Alleluia into his unwilling ear.’

³ Peter Brown (b. 1935) had been acclaimed for his first book, Augustine of Hippo (1967). In the Sunday Times of 3 December 1967 T-R had written: ‘Mr Brown is an impeccable scholar but also a vivid biographer and a delightful writer’. He added that the book brought to life ‘a personality of infinite complexity who dominated a dramatic era in the last agony of the Western Roman Empire’.

¹ Charles Montagu [C. M.] Doughty (1843–1926), poet, writer, and traveller. T-R greatly admired the inventive prose of Doughty’s two-volume Travels in Arabia Deserta (1882). In a long appreciation of Doughty in his Wartime Journals, T-R had written, ‘Doughty is neither baroque (his personality was too complete) nor classical (his style is too elaborate); he is unique, a law unto himself in literature.’

² Hugh Schonfield (1901–88) was a Hebrew Christian, campaigner for world peace, and prolific historian of the early Christian religion and church. He published a historical biography of Jesus in 1939. The quest for the historical Jesus was one of many subjects outside T-R’s chief areas of study in which he engaged in controversy.

³ Charles Guignebert (1867–1939), Professor of the History of Christianity at the Sorbonne from 1919, was a pupil of Ernest Renan and a follower of Alfred Loisy (see the next note). He wrote the first French biography of Jesus Christ from a strict historical standpoint (published in 1933). His other books included Modernisme et tradition catholique en France (1907) and Le Monde juif vers le temps de Jésus (1935).

⁴ Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) was a French Catholic priest and theologian who challenged the historical value of the Old and New Testaments. Five of his books were placed on the Index in 1903 and he was excommunicated in 1908. Professor of Church History at the Collège de France 1909–32.

⁵ Alfred Loisy: sa vie, son œuvre by Albert Houtin (1867–1926) and Félix Sartiaux (1876–1944), which was not published until 1960, depicted its subject as a faithless priest who remained in the Church from ambition rather than sincerity.

⁶ The French philosopher, philologist, and orientalist Ernest Renan (1823–92), an unfrocked seminarist who was briefly Professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France (1861–2), published his controversial Vie de Jésus in 1863. His robust views on national identity were unpalatable to 20th-century opinion.

⁷ Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem (1897–1982) was born in Berlin, but migrated to Palestine, where he was Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1933–65. He was an intimate friend of Walter Benjamin, and an influence on Borges, Derrida, and Eco: Jürgen Habermas spoke at his funeral. T-R may have encountered him through Scholem’s opposition to the execution of Eichmann and as a result of their shared objections to Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

¹ In 1967 T-R had accepted an invitation to visit Formosa (Taiwan), which impressed him as ‘confident and prosperous, investing in itself both materially and spiritually’.