¹ (Sir) Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1922–2009), Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and Student of Christ Church 1960–89.

¹ (Sir) Colin Davis (1927–2013), then Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra; Musical Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 1971–6.

² The Frost Report was a satirical television programme—fronted by (Sir) David Frost (1939–2013)—which ran for 28 episodes in 1966–7.

¹ Nicolson was deselected by the Bournemouth Conservative Association after voting to abolish capital punishment, abstaining in the vote of confidence in the government’s handling of the Suez crisis, and supporting the Wolfenden committee’s recommendations on the decriminalization of male homosexuality.

² Carlos Thompson was the stage name and nom de plume of Juan-Carlos Mundin-Schaffler (1923–90), an Argentinian-born actor and television producer whose career was mostly spent in Europe. At the time of the National Theatre row over Soldiers he acted as an intermediary between his friend Laurence Olivier and Hochhuth, but later he became the latter’s trenchant critic. He married Rex Harrison’s ex-wife Lilli Palmer, but had boyfriends, and shot himself in Buenos Aires.

¹ T-R reviewed Thompson’s The Assassination of Winston Churchill (1969) in the Sunday Times (11 May 1969) under the headline ‘The Sikorski Case’ and in Robert Blake’s name, because T-R had been advised that his lawsuit might be compromised if it appeared under his own. The review ridiculed Soldiers as a ‘drivelling farrago of nonsense’ and as an act of character assassination by Hochhuth abetted by Kenneth Tynan and David Irving (b. 1938). Tynan he dismissed as ‘the very type of “Trendy-lefty”, the avant garde nihilist conforming rigorously to pattern’, and Hochhuth as ‘one of those pontifical teutonic froth-blowers whose addiction to pretentious prolixity is all too familiar … Let us leave him wringing his hands on a Swiss mountain, far above mere facts, his head in a swirling Alpine cloud of mystical piffle.’ But Irving, as a historian with potential abilities, he judged ‘the most puzzling figure of the three’.

² (Sir) John [J. H.] Elliott (b. 1930) was Evans’s supervisor. A historian of Spain and the Americas, he then held a chair at King’s College London, and was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford 1990–7. He and Michael Howard were the two younger men whom T-R trusted in 1961 to read and criticize his unfinished history of the Civil War period.

³ Lady Annunziata Asquith (b. 1948), eldest daughter of ‘Trim’, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, was at this time stepping out with James H-J. As she was a Roman Catholic, T-R had to suspend ‘my strong, invincible, protestant prejudices—no, rational convictions’.

¹ This letter covers six sides of paper.