A scene from the 2022 Republican Party of Texas convention (Image: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle via AP)

GUNSMOKE

What happened to crime rates when details of gun owners’ addresses were made public? The founder of the SAS in the UK was a fraud and a liar who was also hopelessly incompetent. The great Ferdinand Mount looks at the terrorism scare of the 1810s, how a government engineered it and exploited it for its own political advantages, and the draconian laws it imposed under its cover (how strange that the idea that governments do this should have been in any way controversial during the modern war on terror two centuries later).