ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
AND SOURCES
CHRISTOPHER WOOD
The main source is Wood’s letters to his mother, copies of which are held by the Tate Gallery Archive. I am grateful to the trustees and staff for allowing me to consult these and related papers.
I would also like to thank Winifred Reitlinger, Christopher and Sabrina Perm, Teddy Kennedy, Maurice Dirou, Douglas and Madeleine Johnson, Nigel Stewart at Malvem, Jill Thomas, Euan Cameron, Julian Turton, John Sheppard, Toby Eady, Matthew Gale at Kettle’s Yard, Françoise Steel and Marie-Claude Martin of the Hôtel Ty-Mad.
Richard Ingleby’s Christopher Wood: An English Painter (Allison and Busby) had not been published when I wrote my life, but I read it while mine was in proof and was able to compare notes with him on dates, spellings and so on. Richard Ingleby’s loan of various papers also spared me hours at the photocopier. It is not gratitude, however, but admiration for the result that makes me able to recommend his biography unreservedly.
Wood was a terrible speller and was not well served by the typist who transcribed his letters. I cannot guarantee that I have corrected all their errors, particularly in proper names. Most of the translations from the French are my own, so a similar doubt must hang over their accuracy.
RICHARD HILLARY
The principal sources are: The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary, Macmillan, London, 1943; Richard Hillary: A Biography by R. Lovat Dickson, Macmillan, London, 1950; Mary and Richard by Michael Burn, Andre Deutsch, London 1988; documents in the Richard Hillary Trust archive at Trinity College, Oxford.
Arthur Koestler’s essay ‘The Birth of a Myth’ was published in Horizon, April 1943 and reprinted in The Yogi and the Commissar. Middleton Murry’s essay appeared in Adelphi in July 1944 and was reprinted in Looking Before and After, 1948. Eric Linklater wrote an essay on Hillary in The Art of Adventure, 1947.
I would like to thank Dennis Burden, Clare Hopkins and the Hillary trustees for allowing me to consult the archive; Michael Burn, whose reconstruction of Hillary’s last year in Mary and Richard I have confidently followed on the few occasions where the archive was silent; Tony Gould, John Coldstream, David Woodrow, Godfrey Carter, Barry Brigg and Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris. I have also drawn on reminiscences by former fighter pilots Brian Kingcome and Paddy Barthrop published in the Independent on Sunday in September 1990.
My particular thanks to Captain A.B. Sainsbury, archivist extraordinaire, and to Denise Patterson (née Maxwell-Woosnam) the dedicatee of The Last Enemy.
JEREMY WOLFENDEN
The source was interviews, with the addition of some letters, to Robin Hope, Martina Browne, Neal Ascherson and Michael Parsons. All Wolfenden’s work for the Telegraph was destroyed in the move from Fleet Street to Canary Wharf, though his mother and his cousin Sally Humphreys have some cuttings.
I would like to thank Lady Wolfenden, Daniel Wolfenden, Martina Browne, Sally Humphreys (nee Hinchliff), Godfrey Hodgson, Robin Hope, Philip Howard, Christopher Parsons, Stephen McWatters, David Pryce-Jones, Neal Ascherson; Joe Spence, Matthew Wilson and Penny Hatfield at Eton; Susan Watt (Susie Burchardt), David Shapiro, Robert Cassen, Jeffrey Gray, Philip French, David Marquand, Colin Falck (twice), Rod Prince, Natasha Burchardt (Edelman), Anthony Page, Michael Sissons, David Edwards, David Murray, Brian Wenham, Michael Parsons, Norman Dombey, Ronnie Payne, Chris Dobson, David Floyd, Colin Welch, Ricky Marsh, Phillip Knightley, Martin Page, Oleg Gordievsky, Mark Frankland, Douglas Botting, Marcus Warren, Charles Alexander, John Miller, David Shears, Stephen Dorril, Simon Barber, Deirdre Barber and Donald Anderson.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I read more books than I intended in the course of writing this short one, but did not keep a list of them. To two of them, however, I have incurred a debt I should acknowledge.
The first is Francis Steegmuller’s biography Jean Cocteau (Constable, London, 1986). The second is Samuel Hynes’s celebrated trilogy A War Imagined, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, and The Auden Generation (Pimlico, London, 1992). I have borrowed, without feeling the need to double-check, some factual detail from both authors and was often encouraged by Professor Hynes’s, to me, congenial belief that ‘a close relation exists between literature and history, and … this relation is particularly close in times of crisis, when public and private lives, the world of action and the world of imagination, interpenetrate.’
I would finally like to thank Richard and Elizabeth Dalkeith, J.W.M. Thompson, James Fergusson, Malini Maxwell-Hyslop, Sue Freestone and Gillon Aitken.
London, 1996