Scottish writer and historian Horatio Forbes Brown was BOTD in 1824. Born in Nice, France to a wealthy Scottish family, he grew up in Scotland and was educated at Clifton College, where he was taught by John Addington Symonds. He then studied at Oxford University, before moving with his mother to Italy. He settled in Venice, and wrote a number of books about Venetian history and architecture, including his best-known work Studies in History of Venice. In 1889 he took his only paid job, as a researcher for the British government’s Public Records Office. He became a well-known member of the English expatriate community in Venice, hosting lavish receptions on Monday afternoons, entertaining a circle of British homosexual expatriates, including Henry Scott Tuke and Frederick Rolfe. Like many gay men of his class, Brown was attracted to working-class men and had frequently dalliances with gondoliers, sailors, footmen and tram conductors. In 1900, he privately published a collection of homoerotic poems, titled Drift. Brown shared his home for many years with an Italian gondolier Antonio Salin (and Salin’s wife and family). A keen alpinist, he also enjoyed scaling large snowy edifices. He retained a life-long friendship with Symonds, becoming his literary executor. In 1895, he published a highly sanitised biography of Symonds, expunging all references to his subject’s homosexuality and theories about sexual law reform. He returned to Scotland during World War One, staying with his friend the former Prime Minister (and rumoured homosexual) Lord Rosebery. He returned to Italy after the war, dying in 1926 aged 72.