³ Charles Farrell (b. 1919), who had matriculated at Christ Church in 1937, and his wife Katharine (b. 1922) were old friends of the Dacres. Xandra wrote to the Chaneys afterwards to explain that ‘the father of Kitty Farrell was the Marquis of Anglesey and her mother was the sister of Diana Cooper. Her parents were wonderful people, both handsome, artistic and good company. She is the twin sister of the present Marquis who is a military historian.’ In a postscript, she added, ‘Kitty’s ancestor lost his leg at Waterloo and the Prince Regent went looking for it. This is the kind of history I know!’

¹ Sir Oliver Millar (1923–2007), Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures 1972–89, was presented with a Festschrift (edited by David Howarth) entitled Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts (1993). T-R’s contribution discussed ‘Mayerne and his Manuscript’.

² The Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1656) is the subject of a feminist biography by Mary Garard (1991). T-R is referring to facetious comments by Chaney on Gentileschi’s sexual affair, at the age of 17, with her tutor Agostino Tassi. Her father, who was Tassi’s former artistic partner, prosecuted him for rape. Chaney’s reading of the trial documents, as published by Garard, suggested that the case would not have been brought if Tassi had agreed to marry the girl. T-R misunderstood Chaney as having said the rape occurred in England rather than Italy.

³ This is a reference to Mayerne’s recipe for Jones’s melancholy, which was ‘a diet of cold snails for breakfast’. At the time Chaney was contemplating the biography of Jones eventually published in his two-volume edition of Inigo Jones’s ‘Roman Sketchbook’ (2006). In fact T-R did not use this bonne bouche in his book on Mayerne.

⁴ While being shipped from Italy to London, pictures bought for Charles I were damaged by mercury, which was being carried in the hold of the same ship. As Chaney explained in his reply, this event was documented by Alessandro Luzio in La Galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all’Inghilterra (1913).

⁵ Waterton’s word for curare.

¹ A five-part ITV drama-documentary, based on the book Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries (1986) by the novelist, political columnist, and broadcaster Robert Harris (b. 1957). T-R was played by Alan Bennett, who had been a pupil of K. B. McFarlane’s.

² Toby Low, 1st Baron Aldington (1914–2000), had in 1989 been awarded £1.5 million, plus £500,000 costs, in the libel action which he brought against Count Nikolai Tolstoy about the repatriation of Cossacks to Stalin’s Russia.

³ (Sir) John Pope-Hennessy (1913–94), art historian and Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum 1967–73, and of the British Museum 1974–6. T-R had first met Pope-Hennessy when they were fellow guests and protégés of Pearsall Smith in wartime Chelsea.

⁴ i.e. Walter Neurath (1903–67). T-R gave the second of the lectures, published as The Plunder of the Arts in the Seventeenth Century (1970).

⁵ Chaney had just become historian to the London region of English Heritage, a post which required him to commute to London from Oxford.