In keeping with Foreign Office rules, Nicko Henderson's first retirement took place on his sixtieth birthday in April 1979. Hailing from a distinguished academic family and joining the Diplomatic Service during the war, Henderson had risen rapidly, finishing with a ‘plum’ posting as Her Majesty's Ambassador to France. As departure day approached, the outgoing mandarin formed ‘a vague idea that I might write a biography or some work of history’, but the incoming Foreign Secretary had other plans. Lord Carrington had read and admired Henderson's valedictory despatch from Paris, which dissected the causes and consequences of Britain's national decline and had produced controversy after being leaked to The Economist newspaper. A few weeks after the Conservatives’ election victory, Carrington rang Henderson up at his London flat. ‘Nicko,’ he said, ‘I want you to go to Washington.’ It was highly unusual for a career diplomat to be handpicked for an ambassadorship in the style of a political appointee, especially one who had crossed into his seventh decade. Three years later, order was restored: Henderson retired again and quickly fell into a groove well-worn by jobbing ex-ambassadors. It included commercial directorships (the Channel Tunnel Group, Sotheby’s, Hambros), arts trusteeship roles (the National Gallery and the BBC), ceremonial posts (Lord Warden of the Stannaries and Keeper of the Privy Seal of the duke of Cornwall), plus fulfilment of that earlier ambition to become the author of many books.

Henderson's career, including the exceptional dispensation which allowed him to go on until sixty-three, illuminates the powerful culture of retirement which operated at the postwar Foreign Office.

Q. You were born in Málaga in 1944, eighty years ago. What are your very earliest memories?

A. Among my earliest memories is of a freak snowstorm in Málaga! But what I remember most is not cold weather but rather the warmth of my family. Our house was a frequent destination of my father's friends, who enjoyed reciting poems, making music, and conversing. But the one memory that stands out is of my mother cooking in the kitchen, fanning the flames in a big coal-fired iron stove. I sat there performing various tasks to help out, one of which was to separate the stones from the lentils. In those days, everybody was trying to make just a little bit more money, and vendors who sold things like lentils would mix in stones so that a “pound” of lentils was actually less than a pound. My mother would give me the job of separating the lentils from the stones. That's an image that has accompanied me through my entire life as a guitarist, because while I am practicing, I am always separating the “lentil” notes from the “stone” notes. And I think that's what we have to do with everything in life, to remove the bad from the good, to separate the stones from the lentils.

When you asked me about my earliest memories, my head was immediately bombarded by some very happy images, especially of my uncles coming over to see Celin and me, even before Angel was born, when I was 2 years old. I was born in March 1944 and he was born in August 1946. But my memories go back before he was there, when it was just Celin, who was often playing the guitar.

Serfdom is a deceptively simple shorthand term for any institutional system in which ‘a landlord was legitimately entitled to restrict the choices of people living on his lands, including binding them to his territory, compelling them to work for him and limiting many of their other economic and demographic decisions’. As such, it covered a wide range of social arrangements across Europe and Asia over the last two millennia. According to Dennison and Ogilvie, at core:

Serfdom consisted of two distinct components: personal serfdom, where the legal status of the serf was inherited by all his or her progeny, and tenurial serfdom, where the tenant's obligations to the lord were the result of holding unfree land. Furthermore, serfs – no less than free peasants – might also be subject to other restrictions imposed by their communities or by the state, such as agricultural bylaws or taxation. Hence serfdom generally implied subjection to a ruler as well as a lord.

The Festival of Empire

The year 1910 was a busy one for Holst. Since the composition of the First Suite in E-flat for Military Band the previous year, there had been a flurry of activity along the compositional front. Two major works appeared in 1910. The first was the orchestral suite Beni Mora, Op. 29, No. 1 [H107], which began life as a projected ballet. It was performed under the titles Oriental Suite and Suite in E minor before it was published. The second major work was The Cloud Messenger, Op. 30 [H111], described on its title page as an “Ode for Chorus and Orchestra on a Sanskrit poem of Kalidasa.” Over forty minutes in length, it is the composer's largest Sanskrit choral work. The orchestration is enormous, including a large orchestra, two harps, and organ, although perhaps in keeping with the identification of “ad lib” instruments in the First Suite in E-flat, Holst characteristically indicated that some of the instruments “can be dispensed with.”

The year 1911 was equally busy. The first group of his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, Op. 26 [H97] was performed for the first time, and Holst himself gave the first performance since the seventeenth century of Henry Purcell's opera The Fairy Queen with his students at Morley College for Working Men and Women. He also composed the 2nd Military Suite in F minor—the first version of his Second Suite in F for Military Band, Op. 28, No. 2 [H106]—during that year. In addition, there were two military band works intended for the Festival of Empire: Incidental Music for the Pageant of London [H114] and Morris Dance Tunes, Sets I and II [App III, 12]. There may have been a third, the untitled march known today as Three Folk Tunes [H106A].

In an age when shipping was the sole means of transport between continents and where commanders consequently enjoyed a high status in society, any records that extend our knowledge of the way in which this industry operated are worth examining.

The present work has three purposes. First, it provides a means of access to the marine records known as ‘Protests’ concerning the activities of private mariners operating in the crucial years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Southeast Asia. These testimonies are buried within the collection known as the Malacca Prothocol Books, part of the administrative records covering the period 1786–1825 at Malacca and now held in the British Library. The records were originally set up by the Dutch and continued to be maintained by Dutch officials during the period of British rule. It is hoped that by exposing them here their contents will be made more accessible for future research.

Second, in addition to providing details of the recorded ships, and the masters and crews of these mainly British, Danish and Portuguese ‘country traders’ as they were called, this study describes and analyses the dangers that the mariners faced and the tactics they used to overcome the ever-present perils. Third, the Protests reflect contemporary life, demonstrating how a collection of manuscripts while focused on particularities can open a pathway to a broader perspective on society and events. The work therefore also presents a discussion of the variety of contexts in which the country traders had to operate.

Who Was Goethe?

A curious news item from several years back made the rounds of the German media of the time, providing the nation's Bildungsbürger, its educated elite, with a few short moments of sneering amusement over what they saw as a sign of rising philistinism in the Federal Republic. What had occasioned this particular bout of class snickering were the results of a survey asking the German public the simple question: “Who was Leibniz?” Only about 10 percent of respondents, if I remember correctly, answered by identifying the famous philosopher and mathematician from Hannover—originator of differential calculus and leading pioneer of the Age of Enlightenment—the remainder guessing instead that the well-known name (practically every major German city has, somewhere, a street called Leibniz Strasse) belonged to the inventor of the Leibniz- Keks, the nation's most popular cookie, a rectangular-shaped butter biscuit imprinted with the name “Leibniz.” I very much doubt whether a similar survey on “Mozart” would yield such equally devastating results: Surely, one must hope, a majority of the population would associate that famous name with the Salzburg composer rather than the round, foilwrapped chocolate-marzipan treat, the Mozartkugeln, or “Mozart balls,” so popular throughout the German-speaking lands. As for Friedrich Schiller—dramatist, poet, aesthetic philosopher, co-founder of German classicism—he managed to escape a similarly sweet fate, joining instead Otto von Bismarck, erstwhile Chancellor of the German Empire, in lending his name to a savory, aquatic delicacy: the latter as Bismarck-Hering, the former as Schillerlocken, the skinned and smoked belly portion of the dogfish shark, an aliment whose pale-brown color and wavy shape recall the poet's curly blonde locks.

From 1946 onwards, the Sinfonietta made its way around the world, par¬ticularly through recordings. This chapter considers the work's recorded legacy by examining the approaches of different conductors, ranging from specialists like Kubelík, Bakala, Ančerl, Mackerras and Jílek to others who were less regular performers of Janáček's music.

Otto Klemperer

Following his early advocacy of the work, Klemperer conducted further performances of the Sinfonietta in the 1950s, starting with the Concert¬gebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam on 10 and 11 January 1951. These were warmly received, and the 11 January concert was broadcast and later issued on CD. So, too, was the performance Klemperer gave with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra on 27 February 1956 – apparently the last time he conducted the work.

Klemperer's reputation in the 1960s was for granite-like readings that were often powerfully effective but became increasingly slow in his final years. However, apart from his unduly stately tempo for the Fanfares, his surviving accounts of the Sinfonietta show him more animated: Klemper¬er's conducting has a trenchant, rugged muscularity which reveals a per¬suasive grasp of Janáček's score. Moreover, these performances get us as close as possible to one that Janáček himself heard and apparently admired (he described Klemperer's Berlin performance in 1927 as ‘unmatched’). In short, Klemperer's recorded versions constitute an important link with the composer. The two performances are similar, with the Cologne one in slightly better sound.

Rafael Kubelík

After the war ended, Rafael Kubelík (1914–96) performed the Sinfo¬nietta on many occasions. Plans for him to conduct it at a BBC Sym¬phony Orchestra concert on 27 January 1946 were abandoned at the last minute. The performance was listed in Radio Times and publicity had been circulated (and programmes printed), but as the Western Morning Post reported, ‘The BBC's concert at the People's Palace was marred by the last-moment withdrawal of Janáček's Sinfonietta, which many must have made the journey eastward especially to hear.’

In the expansive structure of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations, small states and duchies remained relatively independent, the borders between them permeable, yet the dynastic and kin relations were tight. Rulers facilitated and supported independent cultural sociability and cultural production at their courts with crosscutting networks according to their intellectual and cultural interests. The case study in this chapter shows that even smaller, provincial states and courts were part of larger social and cultural networks. The poet Jens Immanuel Baggesen (1764– 1826), who travelled through Germany after the scandal around his opera Holger Danske (1789, see also Chapter 10), complained about the region:

The deeper we progress into the multi-coloured Roman Empire, the more fanciful the statistics become, so that from a political point of view we really no longer know where we are and to whom the spot, we are walking on belongs to. Darmstadt, Hanau, Solms, Burggrafschaft, Kurmainz, and Pütter know how many governments are playing blind man's buff here in such a mess that you would think this part of Germany was once broken and happily pasted back together in a hurry.

This chapter will concentrate mainly on what is modern Hesse – exactly the region that Baggesen complained about – yet, with a focus on the town of Offenbach. In the eighteenth century, Offenbach was the family seat of the house of Isenburg-Birstein. It was connected to, and geographically situated between, two other important Musenhofe, and the Free City of Frankfurt. These Musenhofe in modern Hesse were motivated by different understandings of patriotism and political realities, which shaped their political strategies during the Coalition and Napoleonic Wars, and their existence after 1806.

The Epistle is known from a single manuscript, Oxford, All Souls College MS 98, which served G.C. Macaulay as the base text for his edition of most of the poems in Latin. It contains, along with the Epistle and the Vox Clamantis, the Cronica Tripertita, Rex celi Deus, H. aquile pullus, O recolende, the Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia, Tractatus de lucis scrutinio, Est amor, the Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz, Quia unusquisque, Eneados bucolis, O Deus immense, Quicquid homo scribat, and Dicunt scripture. Although Macaulay thought the manuscript “was certainly written and corrected under the direction of the author, and remained for some time in his hands, receiving addition from time to time,” more recent scholarship (most notably that of Malcolm Parkes) has shown most of Macaulay's guesses to be unfounded.1 This is especially true of the Epistle, which Macaulay and most subsequent scholars, following him, believed “seems to relate to this volume in particular,” thereby providing evidence that All Souls MS 98 “was eventually presented to Abp. Arundel.”

In fact, All Souls MS 98 is an assemblage of poems independently copied in two different scripts by five different scribes, the major texts, such as the Vox Clamantis, originally as stand-alone works. In Parkes's view, the composite volume never belonged to Gower, but rather was brought together for a patron-owner after Gower's death. It was thus not the “librum” mentioned in ll. 1 and 8, nor the “scriptum” of ll. 3 and 14, given to Arundel.

I have spent many long, cold, damp, windy, lonely hours aboard a destroyer. I should say immediately that I have never been and am never likely to be in the Royal Navy. I simply do not have the discipline or the stomach. Yet, I do feel an immense sense of pride in my destroyer, for I think the historic ship does at least engender a certain sentiment in the quirky spaces and care lavished in keeping her presentable. I was fortunate to work, for several years, aboard HMS Cavalier as a visitor assistant for the trust that acts as her custodian. In those apparently bleak hours spent pacing up and down the deck, feeling the thwack of wet flags in my face and speaking with endless enthusiasts about her armaments, ‘yes, 4.5-inch shells, the range is 10 miles, you could lay siege to Maidstone’, I developed an overriding affection and, of course, interest in destroyers. I grew up in a dockyard town and I believe an awareness of and engagement with a naval past has contributed to this obsession in my adult life, but it took several years to acknowledge.

This book has come from an intense urge to show that destroyers were more than the pawns of the navy. They were the greyhounds. They held and still do hold an immense amount of admiration and fascination for historians and enthusiasts. They performed such an integral part in naval operations, but also aided in defining Britain's naval identity and culture. The destroyer is a warship, a symbol of resilience and a defining link between cultures and identities.

Around the same time that women such as Margaret Baker were explaining charges of infanticide with reference to false conceptions, male physicians and surgeons in England's capital were beginning to argue that such conceptions were a misnomer. Writing in 1777, physician, midwifery teacher, and founder of the Westminster Lying-in Hospital, John Leake, suggested that false conceptions were not to be ‘looked upon as a false production of nature herself’. Rather than approach the mole as an unnatural form of generation, Leake argued that these so-called conceptions were simply uterine tumours or retained placentas. Leake concluded that the idea of ‘the false conception lies in the brain of old women, and silly nurses’. The notion that false conceptions were not, in fact, a form of human generation was one that turned centuries of medical knowledge on its head. By the end of the eighteenth century, as I show in this chapter and the next, terms like ‘false conception’ and ‘mola’ were disappearing from medical treatises, textbooks, and midwifery guides, replaced with new theories about uterine expulsions. False generation was being reclassified, such that these phenomena were not envisioned as a separate, ‘false’ form of conception following sexual intercourse. Now, they were explained as the aftermath of true conception and reproductive-related by-products, including retained placentas, retained menstruation, miscarriages, and uterine diseases.

In this chapter, I trace the emergence of these new theories about false conceptions and molas, to make sense of Leake's claim that moles were simply the erroneous beliefs of ‘silly’ or ‘old’ women. I argue that there were two medical figures in particular who were responsible for the changing anatomical and surgical perspectives on false conceptions which appeared at this time.

In an era in which the long-established modes of communication by mail, letter-writing, and face-to-face interactions have increasingly been displaced by digital media – video, audio, text, and images – the epistolary form might seem like a ‘throwback’. Online culture, email, and texting privilege immediacy and speed, and chatbots substitute simulation for human interactions. No such privileging for letter-writing, one of the traditional channels. The humorous evocation of its form and processes in the quaint epithet ‘snail-mail’ occludes the aesthetics that are part of letter-writing. Hine's sonnet, with which this article begins, draws attention to that aspect of letterwriting, whether as a general activity or a specially cultivated form. The poem's formal title and Petrarchan sonnet structure reprise an earlier era and, along with the first stanza, frame letter-writing as a now vanished narrative genre that once regaled the rich and dramatic lives of humans.