1. Lascelles was British Ambassador to Ethiopia 1949–51, to Afghanistan 1953–57 and, as Sir Daniel, to Japan 1957–59.
2. The Moshulu, a four-masted Finnish-registered barque, was one of the ten sailing vessels owned by Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn in the Aaland Islands which took part in the grain race from Australia to Europe in 1939. Moshulu, laden with Australian wheat, won in the time of ninety-one days. The language used on board was Swedish.
3. 6 RSF, 15 (Scottish) Division.
4. Wanda Newby wrote an engaging account of her early life in Slovenia, then a province of Italy, and her wartime years near Parma in War and Peace: Growing up in Fascist Italy (London, Collins, 1991). Marrying Eric in 1946, she lived with him happily for over sixty years.
5. Eric Newby, A Traveller’s Life (London, Collins, 1992).
6. Tony Davies, When the Moon Rises (London, Leo Cooper, 1973). Davies made a remarkable attempt at escape, walking seven hundred kilometres down the crest of the Apennines for three months until he was shot in the foot and recaptured on the Sangro river. After the war he qualified in medicine and practised as a much-admired family doctor in the Tillingbourne valley in Surrey.
7. In 2008 Merlin still maintain medical staff in Badakhshan and Takhar, where they specialize in helping the Afghan authorities to reduce maternal mortality.
8. The film would have been produced by Peter Firstbrook and directed by Amanda Theunissen.
9. In 2007, The Royal Society for Asian Affairs invited me to give a lecture on ‘Eric Newby, The Hindu Kush and The Ganges’ which was later published in Asian Affairs, vol. XXXVIII, no. III, November 2007.
10. In 1959, a group of German climbers from Nuremberg claimed the honour of having been the first to scale Mir Samir. They had evidently bivouacked nearer the summit than we had dared to do, and so had been able to get up and down the following day.
11. Sandy Gall was the leading British journalist to report, by television films and also by his books, on the resistance led by Masud. In addition, in 1983 he founded Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal as a charity to provide orthopaedic equipment and workshops for disabled Afghans.
12. The Icon film Travellers’ Century: Eric Newby (TX 2008 BBC4) was directed by Harry Marshall and filmed by Benedict Allen.
13. Hallmark Hall of Fame television film Love and War 2001.