¹ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), Jesuit priest and palaeontologist, who was forbidden by his religious superiors to publish his book The Phenomenon of Man, though it would appear posthumously.

² In his review (published in Mind, volume 70) of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Medawar declared: ‘The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought.’ He described the greater part of the book as ‘nonsense, tricked out with a variety of tedious metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself’.

¹ Vincent Tilsley (b. 1931) came to prominence as a television serial scriptwriter with The Makepeace Story, a family saga set in a cotton town (1955). His adaptations of literary classics into television serials included Scott’s Kenilworth (1957), Austen’s Emma (1960), and Dickens’s David Copperfield (1966). He was said to have abandoned writing for television, and became a psychotherapist, after his six-hour drama about the final days in the bunker, ‘The Death of Adolf Hitler’ (broadcast in 1973), was cut to under two hours’ running-time. Clive James commented that Tilsley ‘had obviously soaked himself in Hitler’s table talk, perhaps to the irreversible detriment of his own prose style’ (Observer, 14 January 1973).