Gerard Baker
Saint Ronald
Since Richard Crossman first spilled the beans on his Cabinet colleagues back in the 1960s, political diaries have become a rich resource for historians and a potent new weapon in the internal warfare that is modern democratic government.
For scholars and interested observers, subsequent publication of the contemporaneous observations of policymakers offers a chance to reconsider the context of long-familiar political events. For the diarists, they serve a much more important purpose. Like unexploded bombs, timed to detonate after their writers have left office, diaries can excoriate critics, punish enemies and deride turncoats, while all the time offering ringing self-validation of every decision made by the author in office.
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'Typical of Dickens to leave us with an unsolvable game of Cluedo. Was it John Jasper with the necktie in the cathedral, Stony Durdles with the fibula in the graveyard or Mrs Crisparkle with the arsenic in the close?'
Frances Wilson does some sleuthing.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/murder-he-wrote-2
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They 'disliked Georgian architecture because it was identified with the enclosure movement ... their preferred style was Elizabethan: half-timbered and gabled'.
Jane Ridley on the houses Edwardian Liberals built.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/liberal-habitats