Notes

Locomotion of Laundry: the term Locomotion was coined by Sir Thomas Browne. Flag: every day for forty years Despina Achladioti, the sole remaining islander on Rho, flew Greece’s colours in defiance of Turkish authorities who claimed the island was in Turkish waters. She died alone in 1982 and was buried on the island with full military honours. The Queen of Naples refers to The Tempest and to a treatise on beekeeping by Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie, first published by Joseph Barnes, Oxford, in 1609.   After the Frontier, ‘the Golden Road to Samarkand’ recalls a line from the verse play Hassan by James Elroy Flecker which opened in London in 1923. When the Third Afghan War was resolved in late 1923, wives were permitted to join members of the British Legation in Kabul for the first time. First Flower of the Day takes some lines from Pierre de Ronsard’s poem “Mignonne, allons voir si la rose”, 1545 (let us see if the rose who showed off her dress of purple to the sun this morning...) and Donne’s ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, c.1611. A Piece of Chalk is written after an essay on the colour white by G.K. Chesterton, The Daily News, (London) November 4, 1905.

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