A reporter in the Sunday Telegraph is found talking to a Ron Pollard of Ladbroke's, the betting people, in an endeavour to get odds on the restoration of the Grand Duke Vladimir in 1995. "Let's get this right," says Ron. "The overthrow of the Communist regime and its replacement by this geezer? You name [the odds]. You'd get shorter odds on aliens landing on earth." On feels that 1995 is a little late for quite such an attitude, but then Vladimir did die not so long afterwards.

Our scribbler has a fondness for Prince Bulow's Memoirs and in another Russian book in the lot we find him praising the looks of Princess Victoria [Melita] and saying that "the melodramatic way in which she finally left Darmstadt which had respected her as its ruler for seven years did not reveal very good taste. [Later] On Sunday 8th October (new style) Cyril got married to Victoria Melita von Coburg. The wedding took place at Tegernsee and was celebrated by my sister-in-law's priest. The situation had become impossible and, since peace had come at last, Cyril was keeping his promise to wait until then. We had done all we could these last four years to hinder this marriage, but their love refused to be separated and so finally we considered it better both for Cyril's name and honour that the business should end with a wedding."

It may be recalled that RD recently published an article on Pushkin and Tsar Nicholas I. Inserted here is a review dated October 26th, 1967, of a book entitled Pushkin: A Biography by David Magarshack (Chapman and Hall), which covers something of the subject. The review is by Kyril FitzLyon, whose book on Tsarist Russia is well-known. Another scribbled note points out that Pushkin was the grandfather of the Countess Torby, morganatic wife of the Grand Duke Michael, grandson of Nicholas I.

Pasted into one of Catherine Radziwill's books, Nicholas II, The Last of the Tsars, is a long cutting from The Guardian of March 16th, 1967, the fiftieth anniversary of the Tsar's abdication. The quotation is too long to reproduce here but it comes from the unpublished autobiography of Philips Price, the Special Correspondent of the old Manchester Guardian in Russia at the time. Price was in Tiflis on the day and he witnessed the defection of the Army of the Caucasus. One would like to read the rest of his book.

There is an interesting exchange of letters dated 1952. A letter of July 9th from the Sunday Times informs Miss Gray that the Duchesses of Edinburgh and Albany would not have had Civil List incomes from the British before the First World War but from grand-ducal revenues. By August she had secured confirmation from Whitaker's Almanack that both ladies were receiving £6,000 annually from the British in 1911 and she hastened to confirm this to the Sunday Times, who replied that they "find the fact surprising".

A copy of Agnes de Stoeckl's amusing book My Dear Marquis is riddled with ink additions and cuttings. Perhaps the most interesting is a long Sunday Express interview with the Baroness, by then living in a cottage on the Kent estate at Coppins. She was a game old lady, driving extremely fast at the age of 82 and just about to leave for Monte Carlo. She was apparently known to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh as 'Auntie Ag' since they had known her all their lives. She was to be on the radio at Christmas, recalling Christmases long past. "What a joke," she told the reporter. "I can't even remember last year's."

Halfway through the book there is mention of Grand Duchess Vladimir and this produces a inked quotation from Elinor Glyn, who described her as "a magnificent, stately princess, who said: "Everyone always writes books about our peasants. Come and write one about how the real people live." Another quote says that Alfred Potocki "was ginger-haired, small and passionately interested in the Almanach de Gotha. The whole family spoke many languages fluently, had relations in every capital and were very cosmopolitan." The Potockis apparently managed to keep the Lancut estate together right through to 1944, when the Russians were coming. Alfred managed to flee with 600 crates containing his various art treasures and got them over the frontier, where they lay in a railway siding for a year until he got them to Vienna. The house itself was spared by the Russians and is now a museum.

The Baroness's grandson, Count Vincent Poklewski-Koziell, features in several cuttings, not least running a chain of dry cleaning shops and pressing clothes himself (Daily Express, June 18th, 1964). He married a Countess Natalie Potacka in 1958 but his parents didn't attend, staying at home in another cottage at Coppins. They were Roman Catholics and didn't go for register offices, although Countess Natalie was busy trying to get her first marriage annulled by the Pope. If she did, reported the Daily Mail, there would be a religious ceremony that everyone could attend.

There was a wedding in June, 1967, between Major Anthony Patrick Ness and Princess Frederick of Prussia, widow of Prince Frederick of Prussia and daughter of the Earl of Iveagh, I discover from another cutting. The interesting thing here is that the Princess was given away by her eldest son Prince Nicholas von Preussen, an officer in the Royal Scots Greys serving in Germany.

A copy of The Royal House of Greece (Gould Lee), contains a comment from the famous Madame Prunier, who had known Marie of Romania. George II of Greece, in exile with Marie's daughter Queen Elizabeth, confided to her "with every appearance of good humour, how happy he was to be a king no longer. 'It's a galley-slave's life, believe me,' he told me." Perhaps this is why, when he was restored, Diana Cooper found him "quite altered. He had lost five stone and some of his affability. He has not one man he can trust or take advice from, or one personal friend." Among other cuttings here is a death notice for Colonel Dimitrios Levidis, who died aged 73 in February 1964. He had been attached to the Greek Court since 1917, latterly as Grand Marshal of the Court. He followed the family into exile in 1923 and again during the Second World War, accompanying King George to Cairo and then to London. There is another very small cutting from the Daily Telegraph dated June 13th, 1969, stating that Agnes Blower had died aged 98. She was nannie to Prince Philip on Corfu until he reached the age of four.

Miss Gray seems to have had a special interest in Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, who died in 1980 at the age of 71. The son of Prince George of Greece, he was a well-known archaeologist and man-about-town. He is stated to have "aroused interest in Britain by stating that people could stay warmer by sleeping in a kneeling position rather than lying down". One feels that Britain must have been short of news that August (if it was August). Prince Peter was eventually buried in Denmark in September 1981 in the presence of most of the Danish Royal Family. He had previously had a funeral at the Orthodox Church in Moscow Road, London but his body had been refrigerated while arguments took place between the Greek and Danish Royal families about its future. He was apparently suspected of left-wing views and his marriage to a commoner, Irene Ovichenikov, did not meet with approval. The British Royal Family stayed away from the first funeral, which was thought to be a breach of etiquette. King Constantine organised that one but he failed to get the new government in Greece to allow the Prince to be buried at Tatoi.

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