¹ Double-barrelled titles were not a Wilson coinage, as shown by the examples of Lords Cozens-Hardy (created 1914), Baden-Powell (1929), Noel-Buxton (1930), Courtauld-Thompson (1944), Pethick-Lawrence (1945), Boyd-Orr (1949), Haden-Guest (1950), Hore-Belisha (1954), Granville-West (1958), and Francis-Williams (1962).

² Plas Teg, the seat of the T-Rs, is near the town of Mold in North Wales, close to the border with England. It was bought and restored by T-R’s younger brother Pat.

¹ Robert Beddard (b. 1939), historian of Stuart England and Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Oriel 1967–2006.

² Sir Colin Cole (1922–2001), Garter King of Arms 1978–92, a lumbering, ruddy-faced man whose manners and outlook resembled those of the early Hanoverian age. He spent hours sinking bottles of claret at El Vino’s in Fleet Street, and until his knighthood preferred to be known as Colonel Cole by virtue of his membership of the Hon. Artillery Company. His dilatory, unbusinesslike methods so exasperated Buckingham Palace that none of the heralds was invited to the Prince of Wales’s wedding in 1981.

³ The High Court of Chivalry, as it is properly called, had last been convened in 1954 when the Lord Mayor, aldermen, and citizens of Manchester brought a complaint against the wrongful use of the city’s armorial bearings by Manchester Palace of Varieties, a theatre. The Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshal, and Lord Chief Justice Goddard as Surrogate, presided. This was the first sitting of the Court of Chivalry since 1731 (not 1737).

¹ The elder of Xandra’s two younger sisters, Lady Victoria Montagu-Douglas-Scott (1908–93), known to the children as ‘Aunt Doria’ and by T-R as the ‘bossy’ sister. The two elder sisters were rivals for the love of their father and both claimed to be his favourite.

² The barony of Dacre of Gilsland fell into abeyance in 1569, and almost certainly became extinct in 1634. Lord Carlisle’s barony was properly spelt Dacre of Gillesland.

¹ Anthony Brand, 6th Viscount Hampden (1937–2008), stockbroker, who in 1980 published an edition of the letters exchanged between the first viscount, who was also 23rd Baron Dacre, and his wife.

¹ These three progressive-minded academics, the historians Asa Briggs (b. 1921) and Alan Bullock (1914–2004) and the economist John Vaizey (1929–84), had received life peerages on the recommendation of the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Vaizey, however, resigned from the Labour Party in 1978, exclaiming of its front bench in the Lords, ‘Trots the lot!’, and took the Conservative whip the following year. Bullock resigned from the Labour Party in 1981 to join the break-away Social Democrats.

² Life peers created at Wilson’s recommendation: all but Brayley and Energlyn were nominated in his notorious resignation honours list of 1976. Desmond Brayley (1917–77), who received his peerage in 1973, resigned as Under Secretary for the Army in 1974 after the Department of Trade opened an investigation into his Canning Town Glassworks, and was awaiting trial for conspiracy to defraud shareholders at the time of his death. Joseph Kagan (1915–95), manufacturer of the Gannex raincoat, fled to Israel with his young secretary, was extradited, and served a ten-month prison sentence for defrauding the public revenue. Rudy Sternberg (1917–81), a German refugee who made a fortune in petrochemicals and trading with the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, had been trustee of a confidential fund which subsidized Wilson’s secretarial staff when he was Leader of the Opposition 1970–4, and was consequently created Lord Plurenden. The miner’s son William Evans (1912–85), Lord Energlyn from 1968, Professor of Geology at Nottingham University 1949–78, was a bubbly expert on coal-dust diseases. Lew Grade (1906–98) was a theatrical agent, impresario, and film-producer. T-R had been fascinated by the social enterprise of the publisher George Weidenfeld (b. 1919) since the early 1950s.

¹ Since 1972 T-R had been working on a biography of the early modern physician Sir Theodore de Mayerne, a subject that would occupy him, intermittently, for the rest of his working life. The book was incomplete at his death.

² Worden was breathalysed by the police, who had mistaken his car for another, after some drinks with T-R. The test result, which Worden was awaiting when T-R wrote, found that he was fractionally below the prosecutable limit.

¹ In Alps and Sanctuaries (1881).