Nick Foulkes was commissioned to interview Princess Ira von Fürstenberg for The Aesthete column in the HTSI (How To Spend It) supplement to WeekendFT, an agreeable task.
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.