Monday, April 2, 2012

Nom du jour

In the Dec/Jan issue of the Literary Review Christopher Andrew, professor of modern and contemporary history at Corpus Christ College, Cambridge, reviews Robert Service’s new book Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West. He reports that:
In the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, Service’s main source of new material, he has uncovered possibly the most preposterously named intelligence officer of the early twentieth century, Monsieur Faux-pas Bidet…
Isn’t that “of the early twentieth century” an extraordinary qualification – surely this man was the most preposterously named intelligence officer, if not person, of all time?

4 comments:

helenalex said...

My colleagues and I once had a competition to find the most ridiculously-named historical figure, which I won with Sir Farquar Buzzard, 19th century professor of medicine at Oxford. But Service wins.

Paul said...

Let us not forget Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudesley Shovell.

Paul said...

Nor should we forget Lord Anne Hamilton, a man whose father was so sycophantic that he named his son after Queen Anne, the son's Godmother.

Keri Hulme said...

'Anne" for males (especially as part of 'double-jointed' names) wasnt at all uncommon in the 18th/early 19th centuries...and I still correspond with a male called "Anne-Hillarion" whose mother was a D. K Broster fan...at 80plus, he now calls himself "AH - me."