¹ In his essay ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, published in 1983, and later in The Invention of Scotland, T-R discussed the imposters John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart, soi-disant Count d’Albanie, and Charles Edward Stuart. These were the brothers John Carter Allen (1795?–1872) and Charles Manning Allen (1799?–1880), who pretended to be legitimate grandsons of the Young Chevalier, Charles Edward Stuart. In 1842 they published Vestiarium Scoticum, or The Garde-Robe of Scotland, asserting the antiquity of the use of clan tartans on the basis of a fifteenth-century manuscript, which Walter Scott dismissed as fraudulent. Their monumental The Costume of the Clans (1844) pictured medieval, Catholic, Celtic Scotland as a jewel of sophisticated European civilization.

² Stourton’s private press had recently issued a volume of essays edited by John Jolliffe, Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk. T-R’s phrase ‘your hero’ was a tease, as he knew that Stourton had found Moncreiffe difficult.

¹ Kenneth de Courcy.

² The autobiographical account composed when Scott resided at Ashestiel, on the Tweed near Melrose.

¹ The ‘change’ at Oxford had progressed further than T-R knew.

² Virgil, Georgics 2.486. ‘May I love the waters and the woods, even if without fame?’.

³ Roelant Savery (1576–1639) was Dutch; Valerio Castello (1624–59) worked in Genoa.

¹ Because of building work, the Beefsteak had vacated its club premises at 9 Irving Street, which joins Leicester Square to Charing Cross Road. During the closure, Beefsteak members decamped to the Travellers in Pall Mall.