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David Niven’s empty horses
SIR: David Horspool’s beautifully judged search for a Historian Laureate (May issue) misses one trick. When Joshua Reynolds established the Royal Academy, he was careful to have appointed, as Honorary Professor of Ancient History, a fellow member of Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club: one Edward Gibbon. A current equivalent post-holder is Dame Professor Mary Beard, though her RA title, since 2013, is Professor of Ancient Literature.
In the same issue, Nick Brown’s excellent survey of the career of film director Mihály Kertész alias Michael Curtiz omits his 1936 . Possibly apocryphally, Curtiz is said to have demanded on the set of that movie, ‘Bring on the empty horses!’, which injunction David Niven used as the title of his admirably gossipy 1975 memoir of 1930s
