¹ Mathilda Coster Mortimer (1925–97) had married in 1948 Clemens Heller, Professor of Human Sciences at Paris University, co-founder of the Salzburg Global Seminar and co-founder in 1963 with Fernand Braudel of La Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, where he succeeded Braudel as Director. In the spring of 1963 the T-Rs had rented the Paris apartment, at 6 rue du Tournon, which Madame Heller had inherited from her grandmother. ‘At present our flat is rather convulsed, as the owner (who is really rather dreadful) is here, occupying part of it herself and the whole of it uninhabitable by noise, telephoning, workmen, femmes-de-ménage, secretaries, etc,’ T-R reported on 8 February 1963 to James. ‘We hope to get the rent, which is high, reduced on account of this, but I am not too optimistic: Fernand Braudel describes her as très riche—et très avare!’ Having divorced Heller in 1961, she married, in 1963, the 11th Duke of Argyll, and set up as chatelaine at Inveraray Castle. She took an eager delight in the company of the intelligentsia, sent T-R zestful but artless letters, and began publishing articles on political philosophy.

¹ ‘His talk is of bullocks.’ Johnson’s put-down of his old friend John Taylor, a country clergyman.

¹ Sidney Watson (1903–91), Director of Music at Eton 1946–55, Organist, Choir-Master, and Music Lecturer at Christ Church 1955–70, Conductor of the Oxford Bach Choir 1955–70.

² The George and Abbotsford is a hotel standing on the High Street in Melrose opposite the monastery ruins.

³ Robert Evans (b. 1943), who would become a specialist in the history of Habsburg Europe and eventually one of T-R’s successors as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford (1997–2011). The thesis that T-R examined was turned by Evans into his first book, Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History 1576–1612 (1973).

⁴ Leonid Brezhnev (1906–82), General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1964–82; Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973), de facto Communist leader of East Germany 1950–71 and East German head of state 1960–73; Władysław Gomułka (1905–82), de facto Communist leader of Poland 1945–8 and 1956–70; János Kádár (1912–89), Communist leader of Hungary 1956–88.

¹ At the Soviet State Symphony Orchestra’s début at the Proms on 21 August 1968, on the day that the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia and occupied Prague with tanks, there was barracking and slogan-shouting from sections of the audience. After the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927–2007) played Antonín Dvořak’s cello concerto, he held aloft the conductor’s score of the Dvořak piece to demonstrate his sympathies with the composer’s homeland, Czechoslovakia and the city of Prague—and was roundly cheered. Four days later the Orchestra performed a concert of Russian music at the Edinburgh Festival, said to have been remarkable for its intensity. The violinist David Oistrakh (1908–74) often partnered his fellow Ukrainian, the pianist Sviatoslav Richter (1915–97).

² Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), classicist and philologist, figures in T-R’s Europe’s Physician; Georg Lingelsheim (1556–1636), humanist and historian.

³ T-R spent months reading the Grotius manuscripts, only to lose all his notes on a visit to the British Museum manuscripts room.

⁴ T-R eventually triumphed on this front when he contrived to be awarded a doctorate of divinity from the University of the South in Tennessee in 1980.

⁵ Nigel Lawson (b. 1932), later Lord Lawson of Blaby, was editor of The Spectator 1966–70 and Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983–9. The importunate widow in Luke 18: 1–8 beseeches justice against her adversaries.

¹ T-R had been elected to the Beefsteak in 1966, and soon afterwards resigned from the Garrick to which he had been elected as recently as 1965. He was elected to the Athenaeum in 1978 as a Rule II (distinguished) member, but resigned in 1988. He had been elected to the more raffish Savile Club early in the war.

² Nigel Nicolson (1917–2004), co-founder of the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson and former MP for Bournemouth, and his brother and fellow Beefsteak member Benedict Nicolson (1914–78), editor of the Burlington Magazine, both resented T-R’s review in The Spectator of Nigel’s edition of the third volume of their father’s diaries and letters. T-R described Harold Nicolson as ‘a prolific and felicitous, if sometimes feline writer, sensitive and humane by nature, expensively educated’ before indicting the diarist as snobbish, politically obtuse, and smug. ‘Not a single heretical thought, not a single arresting phrase, not a single profound judgment … That graceful ivory tower, hermetically sealed with protective egotism, is inwardly hollow. Its chambers reverberate only with an elegantly articulated but complacent purr. The spirit within it—that fastidious patrician of life and letters, who claimed special privileges for himself and his friends because of their superior sophistication—is trivial.’ In 1957, while reviewing T-R’s Historical Essays in The Observer, Harold Nicolson had challenged the use of the term ‘essays’ to describe a book largely composed of recycled book reviews, regretted an ‘absence of even average human compassion’, and concluded, ‘Among the strings of his lute there is a wire of hate which is apt to twang suddenly with the rasp of a banjo.’

¹ Aubrey has a life of Thomas Bushell, a confidence trickster, whose mining projects ruined his investors, and who was ‘one of the Gentlemen that wayted on the Lord Chancellour Bacon’. In Aubrey’s account of Edward de Vere, ‘This earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed … that he went to Travell 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd “My lord, I had forgott the Fart”.’

² Rowse regarded himself as an expert on Shakespeare. In ‘The Myth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (Oxford Magazine, 23 January 1964), T-R had mocked Rowse’s dogmatism on the subject. T-R himself looked closely into the question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Though he concluded, not without reluctance, that unorthodox theories on the matter lacked substance, he enjoyed teasing scholars who declined to confront them.

³ Irving Wardle reviewed the play in The Times of 20 August: ‘The production is a curious mixture of stiff classical behaviour, almost suggesting a school play, and ludicrous strokes of invention … At the centre of these spiritless proceedings is Tom Courtenay’s Hamlet. What he presents is an urchin Prince, his triangular face set in an impassive mask, delivering the lines with deadpan eccentricity; sometimes running sentences together, sometimes chopping the sense in half, and rarely communicating anything but boredom … A pygmy performance in a starved production.’

⁴ ‘I fear [the pleas of] Trojan men and women with trailing robes.’ Iliad 6.441 (though T-R has altered or misremembered the first word). Homer’s Hector is resisting attempts to dissuade him from entering battle: T-R fears that James, if T-R tells him of the project which he is ‘now’ pursuing, will try to dissuade him from it. Perhaps the undisclosed subject ‘that sends people mad’ is espionage, for T-R’s The Philby Affair was about to appear. If so he evidently feared his stepson’s reaction to the publication, for James had long urged his stepfather to complete his magnum opus on the English Civil Wars rather than embark on fresh controversies. T-R had his own reproaches for James, who had inhibitions in completing written work. In a letter of 30 April 1967 T-R urged his stepson to ‘take risks’, by which ‘knowledge is advanced’, rather than take shelter in ‘perfectionism’. The letter continued: ‘I know that you will return some of this criticism on me. You sometimes do, and in terms far more wounding than any which (I hope) I have used to you. But I will gladly accept your tu quoque [you also] from you, so long as you will admit that a retort does not necessarily refute an argument. Whatever my own failings, I should like you to succeed.’