² He was recovering from a prostate operation.

³ (Sir) Bernard Williams (1929–2003), Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, 1979–88, had recently published his major works Moral Luck (1982) and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985).

¹ Joseph de Maistre (1755–1821), the chief French theorist of the counter-revolution, emphasized the necessity of suffering and war, and insisted on the role of the public executioner in the preservation of social stability.

² Nancy Mitford (1904–73), novelist and biographer.

³ David Pryce-Jones, Evelyn Waugh and his World (1973).

⁴ In a letter of 29 October 1973, Birkenhead had written: ‘After my three months with E. Waugh at really close quarters, I came to the conclusion that he was an odious, indeed a psychopathic character. It must always be anxious work incarcerated in a pig-sty in an enemy-occupied Balkan country, but to be so in the company of two such Freudian characters is authentically gruesome. It must be seldom that you can find simultaneously a couple so totally divorced from all human kinship, both born without the bowels of compassion … The other essays are mostly contemptible—all stressing the charm and innate loyalty of E. Waugh, who had not the slightest comprehension of either. I should have dealt far more hardly with him … had I not wished to avoid, perhaps cravenly, the insane malice of his repulsive son’, Auberon Waugh. In a letter to Anthony Thwaite (3 September 1976), declining to review a biography of Waugh for Encounter, T-R explained that he was ‘frightened of incurring the insane malice’ of Auberon Waugh: ‘I have other things to do than to contend with irrelevant vendettas!’ Later, however, T-R and Auberon were on good terms, not least because of T-R’s admiration for him as a wine correspondent.

⁵ He mistakenly wrote that Joseph Goebbels had been ‘the prize-pupil of a Jesuit seminary’, who ‘retained to the end the distinctive character of his education: he could always prove what he wanted’.

¹ Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), founder of the sociology of knowledge, author of Ideologie und Utopie (1929), who fled from Nazi Germany to the London School of Economics in 1933.

² Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), France’s leading 20th-century Catholic philosopher.

³ Martin D’Arcy (1888–1976), Jesuit priest and Master of Campion Hall 1933–45.

¹ Greene wrote a sympathetic introduction to Philby’s memoir My Silent War (1968), in which he compared Philby’s subterfuge on behalf of Soviet Russia to the activities of the persecuted Catholics in Elizabethan England who plotted for the victory of Spain. Greene suggested that Philby served Stalinism in the spirit that ‘many a kindly Catholic must have endured the long bad days of the Inquisition with this hope … that one day there would be a John XXIII’.