* One of those who must have produced many of these family ‘conversations’ was Cissie’s brother, Sir Edward Aurelian Ridsdale GBE, later to become Liberal MP for Brighton from 1906 to 1910. He was, unlike the rest of the family, a freethinker, and the author of Cosmic Evolution.

* This term was actually in common usage in this period, when boundaries were only beginning to appear. There were no boundaries at Lord’s until 1866, and they didn’t appear in the revised edition of the Laws of Cricket until 1884.

* Rudyard was even more unkind. He thought at the time that Edie ‘rather cultivated her maladies’, and in later years remembered that she had received the last sacraments as ‘one of her diversions’.6

† It is indicative of this that in his autobiography Rudyard calls the chapter that deals with his time in England before his marriage ‘The Interregnum’.

* By the time he gave this figure to the Chicago Record, Beatty had no interest in doing justice to Rudyard and Carrie.

† The only mention of this ‘fact’ comes from a strange little book called Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont Feud by Frederic van de Water (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1974), p. 25. The book’s main aim is to show that, in the later notorious battle with his brother-in-law, Rudyard had behaved badly in all ways. More of this later.

* An ominous note was struck in this same memoir. Mary Cabot reported that, after the death of one of the Cabot children, Rudyard said ‘that if it were Josephine, he would never be able to think or speak of her again’.

† In fact the seat was so safe that from 1892 until Stan finally relinquished it four decades later the other parties often did not bother to field a candidate.

* The tattooed lady was Emma Frank. She had, as well as the Last Supper, a necklace tattooed around her neck, a crucifixion scene, a Union Jack and a Stars and Stripes (she was an American), an open page of the Bible, and a pair of eyes on her thigh.24

* Sir Austen Henry Layard was both a politician and the excavator of Nineveh; he was also a trustee of the gallery.

* Even Kipling thought that this sort of thing made his uncle a scholar. When Poynter pronounced on a picture, Kipling said, ‘The verdict from a man of his knowledge we may take as conclusive.’37

* Burne-Jones’s views on the Impressionists had been made clear during the Whistler trial. Phil’s were – and remained – no more advanced. As late as 1905 he was writing articles in which he condemned the ‘experiment’ of Impressionism as though it were still in progress – a full year after Picasso’s blue period was complete and he had already moved on to work towards Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

† Himself not included, we must assume.

‡ This form of elitism wasn’t particularly unusual: the National Gallery was often avoided by the middle classes as its lack of admission charges meant that the working classes might be present in the building. The gallery’s restorer reported that a sort of grease was commonly found on the surface of National Gallery pictures. ‘That deposit seems to proceed very much from the class of persons who visit the National Gallery … More copious emanations and exhalations would arise from their clothing than from that of other persons who went decently dressed, and for the real purpose of seeing the pictures.’41 One would like to think that this was the only time the class of the viewer was considered to have an effect on the pictures themselves, but it probably is not.