Footnotes

* The train still runs on the Torbay and Dartmouth Railway.

* Patrick Leigh Fermor, loving pedantries, made notes on Joan’s father for his entry in the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: ‘If the name was ever written with a hyphen, it appears to have been dropped in practice, as it is absent in Burke, Who’s Who, and Debrett’s Handbook, and though the two names are written together neither Graham or your sisters have ever used the hyphenated form.’

* Bertram Cartland and his wife, Polly, were the parents of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland.

* Wickhamford Manor was Lees-Milne’s childhood home.

* This ballet was choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska to music by Francis Poulenc, and premiered in 1924.

* Maurice Spurgeon Green (1906–87): journalist at the Financial Times and Times; editor of the Daily Telegraph, 1964–74.

* The identity of Jeanette is unknown.

* Other bridesmaids included: Baba Beaton; Lady Violet Pakenham, who later married the novelist Anthony Powell; Joan Buckmaster, the daughter of Gladys Cooper; and Margaret Whigham, subsequently Margaret, Duchess of Argyll.

* Sydney Dobell (1824–74) and fellow poets were members of the Spasmodic school, which typically used extravagant and intense language and situations, full of passion and anguish.

* PLF always maintained that The Station, Byron’s book about these travels, was the book that inspired him to carry on from Constantinople to Greece. When he set out on his great walk across Europe he had Ogilvie-Grant’s rucksack on his back.

* Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949): Belgian symbolist poet and playwright.

* Peter Rodd and Nancy Mitford married in 1933.

* Oscar Wilde’s former lover Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) was a friend of John Betjeman.

* There is no bay at Bradwell.

* The ‘Boeuf sur le Toit’, a fashionable gay nightclub, was named after the famed nightclub in Paris.

* Aly is unidentified.

* Francis Noel Baker (1920–2009) joined the army in 1940 and was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps. In 1945 he was elected Labour MP for Brentford and Chiswick but was always strongly anti-communist. His family owned an estate on the island of Euboea.

* Professor Eric Birley (1906–95), historian and archaeologist.

* Elma Napier (1892–1973) was a Scottish-born novelist. She moved to Dominica in 1932 and became known as a writer, hostess, politician and conservationist.

* Georg Groddeck (1866–1934), a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine.

* Nothing changes in the monastic life. Each day is the same as another, each year like the one which went before, and it will be so until death.

* Edmund ‘Mondi’ Howard (1909–2005), diplomat and historian.

* Francis Philip Raphael Howard, 2nd Baron Howard (1905–99).

* PLF probably intends Les 120 de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage by the Marquis de Sade.

* So-called by Henry Miller.

* Cyril used to say that such was the intensity of their relationship that Graham was the love of Joan’s life.

* Home of Cyril Connolly and Lys Lubbock.

* Christopher Buckley (1905–50), war correspondent and novelist. Killed by a landmine during the Korean War.

* The silly mouse gives birth and mountains are born.

* Isabel Delmer married Constant Lambert on 7 October 1947.

* The name of the monk was Henry Joseph Campbell.

* Michael Luke (1925–2005), habitué of the Gargoyle Club and author of David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (1991).

* Schmidt’s Restaurant, Charlotte Street.

* Janetta Woolley (b. 1922); m. Humphrey Slater; Robert Kee; Derek Jackson; Jaime Parladé.

* So ardent was the Spectator for homosexual reform that it was accused of being ‘The Buggers’ Bugle’.

* Aunt Molly was an unmarried younger sister of Bolton, much loved by all the family. Anna was Diana Casey’s eldest daughter.

* Peter Kenward’s first wife was Betty Kenward, who wrote ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ in The Tatler.

* Bookshop, Librarie le Divan, rue de la Convention, Paris.

* A Greek word in common use meaning a group of friends who meet regularly for discussions and an exchange of ideas.

* Being with those you love is enough; dreaming, talking to them, not talking to them, stopping to think about unimportant things, when you’re near them it’s all the same.

* Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (b. 1933), biographer.

* William Butterfield (1814–1900) was one of Betjeman’s favourite architects; he built Keble College, Oxford.

* Joan was to request the passage from the Apocryphal Book of James for her own funeral: ‘Now I, Joseph, was walking, and I walked not. And I looked up into the air and saw the air in amazement. And I looked up into the pole of the heavens and saw it standing still, and the fowls of the heavens without motion. And I looked upon the earth and saw a dish set and working lying by it, and their hands were in the dish and they that were chewing, chewed not . . .’

* No one had ever heard of Mrs McNab, who was probably as surprised to learn about the legacy as everybody else. She quickly sold the story of her supposed great love affair with a Scottish lord to the Sunday Express. A couple of months later, Joan wrote to Paddy: ‘That terror Mrs McNab has written you two complaining letters but saying we can have the desk. I’ve answered her and said at the end: “I’m so sorry the house is a burden to you. What a pity Patrick didn’t leave it to someone else.”’

* PLF had recently sent JB his lines about swimming the Bosphorus.

* Stephen Tennant (1906–87) was the younger brother of David Tennant. In the 1920s and 30s he had an affair with Siegfried Sassoon. Reputedly he spent the last seventeen years of his life in bed.

* Translated from the Greek by Montague Rhodes James.