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To have a majority of even one MP, Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner and the rest of his team have to do better - far better - than Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Prescott, Jack Straw, David Blunkett and the rest.

This “wonderfully digressive” tale of James Jesse Strang — an early American con man — “is littered with thumbnail histories of 19th-century cross-dressing, John Brown, John Deere, the Brontës, bloomers, the Underground Railroad, mesmerism, newspaper exchanges, the Illuminati and much else,” our reviewer, Chris Jennings, wrote.

Said Brown: “John knows literally everything about that playbook. He’s a guy that prepares himself very, very well. That’s something we all know in the building, it’s something we all respect about him. We know he knows everything.”

In addition to Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, Brown’s admirers included the poet Julia Ward Howe, wife of the “Secret Six” member Samuel Gridley Howe, who took a popular folk song about Brown, “John Brown’s Body,” and turned it into “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The slaves were accompanied by an associate of Brown, John Kagi, whose sister, Barbara Mayhew, lived in the cabin with her husband, Allen.