¹ The courtier Sir Edward Ford (1910–2006), who suggested the phrase annus horribilis to the Queen to describe the events of 1992, was married to Virginia Brand (1918–95), a cousin of Lady Dacre and Lord Hampden. The Fords lived at her Palladian house, Eydon Hall in Northamptonshire, from 1963 until 1982. Catto was a neighbour.

¹ Lady Ford had inherited several ancestral portraits of the Dacre family from her father Lord Brand. T-R did not succeed in buying them.

¹‘Of his own accord’.

² Richard Cawston’s BBC television film Royal Family (1969) contained footage of Walter Annenberg (1908–2002), the publishing tycoon who had been appointed by President Richard Nixon as U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, presenting his credentials to the Queen with excruciating orotundity.

¹ In the event, Lord Franks was appointed to conduct the inquiry.

² Exocets (from the French word for a flying-fish) were French-made missiles lethally used by the Argentine navy against British ships in the Falklands conflict.

¹ Sir Harold Acton (1904–94), aesthete and historian, lived in princely style in an imposing villa, La Pietra, north of Florence. His offer to bequeath La Pietra to Christ Church was declined.

² John Rich (1928–95), Ambassador to Czechoslovakia 1980–5 and to Switzerland 1985–8.