Captain Moonlight: Nice pictures, shame about the facts. . .

GOOD TO SEE that the great Dr A L Rowse, historian, Cornishman and holder of iconic status in the irascibility game, resolutely refuses to mellow despite moving inexorably towards his 91st birthday. His review last week of a work by the almost equally eminent Jesuit historian, Father Philip Caraman, contained a model example of the Rowsean last paragraph. Fr Caraman has written a history of the religious uprising in Devon and Cornwall in 1549. Dr Rowse was not impressed: Caraman's touch, he wrote, 'is uncertain with places and people. Menheniot is in Cornwall, not in Devon . . . St Veep not St Yepe . . . St Meen in Brittany, not St Mien . . . Trematon Castle was not the home of the Grenvilles: they were imprisoned there. But the book is cheap and has good illustrations.'