On Iraq he was marginalised by Blair for most of the time, but if he had moved with Robin [Cook] and me, we could have stopped it. But he didn’t move. I just think the young Brown wouldn’t have believed what he ended up doing.

That’s funny, I was sure I recalled Clare Short also not moving with Robin Cook, supporting the war at a crucial time when her resignation could have helped prevent it, and only quitting two months later when it was too late and the invasion was done, because people weren’t treating her as a Big Important Person like they did when they wanted her vote.

It’s a shame that it’s the manner of her death that Mary Ward is best remembered for, because she led a pretty remarkable life at a time when women, for all practical purposes, were excluded from the scientific establishment. Born into an aristocratic family in Ireland in 1827, she was interested in nature from a young age. Then one day, keen to encourage her interest, her parents bought her a microscope – not just any microscope, but the best microscope in the country at the time. This turned out to be a rather smart move on their part, because Mary proved to have a rare talent for illustrating what she observed with it. She became an expert in microscopy, making her own slides of everything from feathers to insect eyes. Her drafting skills didn’t stop there – surrounded by scientists from a young age, her drawings recorded the construction of the Leviathan of Parsonstown – a 72 inch reflecting telescope that was the largest in the world, and would hold that title for half a century. She corresponded with many scientists, and illustrated several books for the physicist Sir David Brewster.

Then, in 1857, disappointed with the quality of microscopy books on offer, she decided to publish a book of her own drawings. Afraid, with good reason, that no publisher would touch it because of her gender, she self-published 250 copies of ‘Sketches with the Microscope’. But it came to the attention of a publisher nonetheless – and they saw that the quality of her illustrations and the clarity of her writing were good enough that the issue of her sex could be overlooked. Renamed ‘The World of Wonders as revealed by the Microscope’, it would go on to such success that it was reprinted eight times over the coming decades.

That wasn’t the last of her popular science publishing career – she wrote two further books, including a telescope companion to the microscope book. Her books were displayed at the 1862 Crystal Palace exhibition; she would illustrate numerous other scientific works for eminent scientists; she published articles in several journals, including a well-received study of Natterjack toads; she became one of only three women permitted to be on the Royal Astronomical Society’s mailing list (and one of the others was Queen Victoria.) She never gained a degree, however – women weren’t allowed to.

And the manner of her death? In1869, aged 42, she and her husband were riding in a steam-powered automobile, home-made by the sons of her cousin, former Royal Society president William Parsons (she was always surrounded by scientists). As it rounded a bend, she was thrown from the car and under the wheels; they snapped her neck, and she died almost instantly. And so she became the first person in the history of the world to die in a car accident.

I suppose you could take from her life story and her far more famous death story a sort of wryly shoulder-shrugging moral fable: that pioneers don’t always get to choose what they’ll be seen as pioneers of. But personally, I think you should probably just take away the thought that, if you have a daughter, a microscope would make a fairly awesome birthday present.

But the most fun thing about it is looking up your namesakes.

Take Thomas Phillips, for example. Quite a common name. You could focus on the Thomas Phillips mentioned in William Griffin’s sodomy trial in 1726 (who lived in Mother Clap’s molly house for two years, but absconded before he could be brought to trial). You could focus on the Thomas Phillips (presumably the same chap each time) who keeps being done for highway robbery in the late 1770s, and clearly wasn’t very good at it.

But my favourite, just for the sheer baffling tumble-of-details slice-of-lifeyness, is Thomas Phillips’s trial for Bigamy, on 7th December, 1826.

Fourth Middlesex Jury – before Mr. Common Sergeant.

Fined One Shilling and Discharged .

“The harlots of Piccadilly hitched up their petticoats and stepped aside. Jostling pickpockets, hearing the commotion, were momentarily distracted, and carriage horses shied on the clattering cobbles. From his drawing room in Arlington Street, Horace Walpole was astonished to hear the sound of drums and trumpets; hurrying to his window he saw a procession carving a path through the crowd. At first, he thought it was a press-gang raising soldiery for the war in the American colonies, for this was the autumn of 1776. It was a war of sorts, but Walpole noticed that the marchers were smartly groomed, ‘dressed expensively, like Hussars, in yellow habits with blue waistcoats and breeches’. These were no warriors, but a hired band of street performers wearing masks, advancing to the beat of martial music and brandishing not muskets but coloured streamers and handbills, which they pressed into the hands of gaping onlookers. On their high caps, picked out in braid, the words ‘Morning Post’ glinted in the watery sunshine. At the head of the procession, Walpole recognized the pugnacious and defiant figure of the young Revd Henry Bate, the editor of that notorious scandal sheet and renowned throughout London as ‘the fighting parson’.

Walpole gazed down on ‘this mummery’ and despaired. ‘What a country!’ he twittered in one of his gossiping news-of-the-day letters. ‘Is there any sense, integrity, decency, taste left? A solemn and expensive masquerade in defence of daily scandal against women of the first rank.’ Walpole had heard that the Morning Post had a rival, the new, but identically named, Morning Post, so packed with even more scandalous matter, he noted, that it ‘exceeds all the outrageous Billingsgate that was ever heard of.’ The opening shots had been fired in London’s first – and highly entertaining – circulation war. The battleground was the paragraphing trade, the inky ancestor of newspaper gossip.

Daring to be different, the original Morning Post was roughly the size of a modern tabloid, cheaper and smaller than the other journals hawked on the street corners of Georgian London by a raggle-taggle army of bugle-blowing postboys. Advertisements dominated the content; one in the first number in 1772 offered for sale a register of addresses of the strumpets of Piccadilly; another (accordingly) offered ‘the famous Patent Ointment for the Itch’. For his morning threepence, the eager reader would also be regaled with a few items of foreign intelligence, news of the court, church appointments, borough elections, accounts of highway robbery, arrivals at the Bath spa, sporting intelligence and even some uplifting poetry. But what really sold the paper were its scandalous paragraphs, teeming with the details of people’s personal lives…”