George II gave 10 Downing Street to the government to provide a home in perpetuity for Prime Ministers and First Lords of the Treasury in 1735. At the time Robert Walpole was PM.
For thirteen days in 1962 President Kennedy chaired a committee convened to decide what the United States should do about Russia’s (secret) deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Why read a book (more than 500 pages) when you know how it ends? This occurred to me as I started Abyss, The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 by (Sir) Max Hastings.