Windscale is supposed to be Britain’s big leap into the nuclear Age, bringing science fiction to life in 1950s Northern England. But in the race to catch up with America’s nuclear program, scientists are tinkering with forces they don’t fully understand. When the reactor catches fire, no-one knows how bad it could be, or how to put it out. As the reactor workers scramble to save lives, other eyes on Windscale are much more concerned with containing the political fallout and burying the truth.

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Further Reading

This script relied on two books by Lorna Arnold – Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident, and her autobiography, My Short Century. The BBC’s 2007 documentary, Windscale – Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Disaster, can be found on YouTube. In the same year, Richard Wakeford published The Windscale reactor accident—50 years on in the Journal of Radiological Protection. Bill Penney is remembered in obituaries by The Royal Society and New Scientist.  

In 1717, Lombe brought them back to Derby in England and there, by the fast-flowing Derwent, he and his half-brother, Thomas, built the first large factory in the world. Lombe himself did not live to enjoy the fruits of his entrepreneurship: he died suddenly at the age of 29. Rumour has it that the Piedmontese sent an “artful woman” to the English Midlands to assassinate him.

Whether or not that is true, the protection of trade secrets has long been a game with high stakes. The Venetian island of Murano is famous for its glass and, given its location at a slight remove from La Serenissima, it is sometimes described as the first industrial park. One explanation for the wholesale removal of glassmaking from Venice to Murano in 1291 is it reduced the risk that the furnaces would start a fire, but it may also have been to exert more control over the secrets of glassmaking. Glass masters of Murano had many of the privileges of Venetian nobility, but were not allowed to leave Venice without permission, and to share the secrets of Murano glass with a foreign power would be to invite the death penalty. Needless to say, the secrets did not last for ever. France’s minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was among those who enticed Venetian masters to share them, and by the late 1600s the best French glass was thought to rival that of Venice.

The death penalty no longer applies to those who reveal trade secrets. They may, however, come to wish they were dead. In one notorious case in 1962, a chemical engineer named Donald Wohlgemuth announced his intention to quit the BF Goodrich Company to accept a job at a competitor, the International Latex Corporation. In another, bakery executive Chris Botticella resigned from Grupo Bimbo in 2010 to join Hostess Brands. In both cases, the jilted employers sued, alleging the likelihood that trade secrets would be revealed, causing irreparable harm.

The trade secrets in question? For Goodrich, some of the more arcane techniques involved in making spacesuits for Nasa. For Bimbo, various confidential documents were alleged to be involved, but the spotlight fell on the baking process necessary to produce the celebrated “nooks and crannies” of their brand Thomas’ English Muffins.

After a gruelling legal process, Wohlgemuth eventually started work at Latex. Just because he had the opportunity to spill trade secrets, after all, does not mean that he would do so. The vivid parallel cited in the case was that an employee with secrets was like a dog with teeth — there can be no presumption that the dog is dangerous until it uses them. Every dog has one free bite.

But if Wohlgemuth was chastened, Botticella was distraught. Faced with the prospect of drawn-out legal hearings, Hostess Brands told The New York Times “we have to move on” and withdrew the offer. Botticella lost both jobs — and the prospect of employment elsewhere in the industry — and he later told the Revisionist History podcast, “You will never understand the impact that this had on my personal and professional life.”

It could have been even worse. In 2016 the engineer Anthony Levandowski left Waymo (Google’s self-driving car unit, which he helped to create) to set up a self-driving start-up. It was swiftly acquired by Uber, and soon after Levandowski was accused of stealing Waymo’s trade secrets. Levandowski was given an 18-month prison sentence. Uber agreed to pay a settlement worth almost a quarter of a billion dollars.

These cases have more nooks and crannies than a Thomas’ English Muffin. Did Goodrich really have such a technological lead in spacesuit design? Did Grupo Bimbo actually have a superior product, or were they killing two birds with one stone by making it hard for their employees to join a competitor while burnishing their questionable claims to have something special? (I have never sampled a Thomas’ English Muffin but strongly suspect that no matter how pleasant it may be when toasted and well-buttered, no mass-produced bread is likely to be unique.)

Not that trade secrets are meaningless. One recent study by Albrecht Glitz and Erik Meyersson looked at cold war industrial espionage in the 1970s and 1980s. Glitz and Meyersson concluded that East German informants managed to divulge enough useful information to bring East Germany’s productivity measurably closer to that of West Germany. Tellingly, these efforts were most successful in East German sectors that were already performing tolerably well. (Had Chris Botticella taken the secrets of the ideal muffin to Uber, and Levandowski brought lidar plans to Hostess Brands, it seems likely that the ideas would have fallen on barren ground.)

The spilling of trade secrets, then, will sometimes meaningfully harm the company which loses the secret, and benefit the competitors that acquire it. But as always with intellectual property, there is a balance: too little protection for ideas, and nobody will invest in the know-how to build a self-driving car or bake a perfect muffin; too much protection is a recipe for monopoly power and stifled creativity.

There is a good case for protecting expensive ideas — such as the design of a plane or the formula of a pharmaceutical compound — for a limited period. But that should not be allowed to be an excuse for effectively shackling employees. And whatever the legal merits of the Botticella case, it is hard to see a public policy justification for defending a muffin recipe that Grupo Bimbo boasts is 146 years old.

Fortunately, most trade secrets don’t last. A 1985 study by the economist Edwin Mansfield surveyed 100 US firms, asking how quickly competitors tended to find out detailed information about confidential new products and processes. The answer, Mansfield found, was about a year for products, and about 15 months for more detailed process information. Some secrets — particularly in chemistry and glassmaking — lasted longer, but in general secrets leaked quickly.

Is that a problem? If the technology itself is harmful, perhaps. But from silk to spacesuits to self-driving cars, we should presume that workers will travel, and that even if they cannot copy blueprints or the details of algorithms, they can be expected to take good ideas with them. Silicon Valley itself was built on such movement. The world is generally better off if good ideas do not take too long to spread.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 17 June 2026.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

This episode is available exclusively to members of the Cautionary Club.

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Further Reading

The main sources for this show were Delta Force by Colonel Charles A Beckwith and Donald Knox; The Perfect Colleague? Multidimensional Perfectionism and Indicators of Social Disconnection in the Workplace by Emily Kleszewski and Kathleen Otto; and the research of my friend David Bodanis.

If you tuned in to late-night WOR radio in 1950s New York, you’d enter the secret world of Jean Shepherd. Shepherd’s nonconformist style, off-beat humour and love of pranks gathered a small but loyal following. These “Night People” loved being in on the joke, while the oblivious “Day People” were often the butt of it. Shepherd’s show is long gone, but his spirit lives on in corners of the internet. Today, though, Night People go by a different name.

Members of the Cautionary Club receive access to monthly exclusive Cautionary Tales episodes, ad-free listening, monthly video episodes and a monthly newsletter.

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Further Reading

This episode relied on Eugene Bergmann’s biography Excelsior! You Fathead: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd, the fan website FlickLives.com, and Matthew Callan’s article in The Awl, The Man Behind The Brilliant Media Hoax Of “I, Libertine”.

Whitney Phillips’ book on 4chan is This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.While the book “I, Libertine” may be a disappointment, a truly explicit and salacious account of sex in the 18th century can be found here.

For air conditioning at the push of a button, we have a young fellow named Willis Carrier to thank. In 1902, Carrier developed a system for the printers Sackett & Wilhelms in which air was circulated over coils that had been chilled by compressed ammonia. His clients were delighted, and the technology was soon being used to make theatres tolerable in the hot summer. (Before air conditioning, many New York theatres simply shut their doors in the summer.)

Since then, air conditioning has shaped the world. Dubai? Singapore? Hard to imagine without Carrier’s big idea — and with so many of the world’s megacities in tropical regions, there is more demand for cooling to come. Residential air conditioning allowed the population of America’s “sunbelt” to boom. The demographic shift had political consequences: in his book How We Got To Now Steven Johnson argued that air conditioning elected Ronald Reagan.

Yet air conditioning has now moved from a deep and subtle driver of political change to being a superficial talking point in yet another culture war.

One side emphasises the idea that air conditioning not only worsens climate change by increasing demand for fossil fuels, but directly warms cities by pumping hot air out of buildings — and for what? A mere extravagance. “It might feel nicer, but making you a little more comfortable isn’t the government’s job,” wrote Hannah Fearn in The Guardian.

Odd — who on earth is proposing government-funded air conditioning? Marine Le Pen, for one: last summer the far-right French politician proposed a large-scale plan to air condition public buildings.

Is it woke to die in a heatwave now? Is installing air conditioning a fascist act? Let us at least try to take the heat out of the argument.

It’s certainly true that in the UK it seems natural that we use energy to heat our buildings but not to cool them. That’s understandable: in the UK it’s unpleasantly cold more often than it is unpleasantly warm. It’s also illogical. Physically speaking, heat and cold both kill — especially the over-75s — and according to a paper published in Nature last December the risk rises much more sharply for excessive heat than for excessive cold. In a house that’s too cold you have options — slippers, cardigan, hot-water bottle. In a house that’s too hot, there is no escape.

It doesn’t make sense to suggest that heating a building to a safe — or even pleasant — temperature is a basic human right, while cooling it is an affectation. If it’s reasonable to do one then it’s reasonable to do both.

So in a world where extreme heatwaves are becoming more common, what should policymakers do about it? I agree that it’s not the government’s job to keep me a little more comfortable — but it would be nice if they would devote less effort to maximising my discomfort.

Sam Dumitriu, the head of policy at the Britain Remade think-tank, points out that in the UK we have placed some extraordinary obstacles in the way of air conditioning. Chief among them are “Part O” regulations that require developers to design buildings that stay cool without air conditioning. The use of air conditioning is allowable as a last resort.

Passive cooling sounds sensible and, in some circumstances, it can mean beautiful, stylish and cost-effective buildings. But insisting that developers exhaust every possibility for passive cooling imposes some unexpected costs. For example, “dual-aspect” cooling simply means having ventilation on two different external walls so that the breeze can blow through. Very sensible unless you’re designing a large apartment block, in which case satisfying dual-aspect rules means cutting away large chunks of the potential floor plan in order to make sure that every apartment is a corner apartment. Sometimes air conditioning is a proportionate solution to a real problem — and given how much solar energy is now available in the summer, it is increasingly sustainable, too.

There is some encouraging movement towards making air conditioning a viable choice. The UK government has been subsidising heat pumps for years, on the grounds that they are an energy-efficient way to heat your home. Heat pumps that can also function as air conditioners have been excluded until recently, but the government announced a few months ago that dual-function heat pumps would now also qualify. Good. (Successive governments have been struggling to persuade people to install heat pumps. Surely it would be a selling point if they doubled as air conditioners?) Dumitriu also tells me that both the UK and London authorities have been liberalising some of the passive-cooling rules.

It is easy to see how such regulations take hold. Subsidies for clean technologies can make sense but are expensive for the Treasury. Taxes on dirty technologies also make sense, but are politically painful. Regulations on the size and the position of windows and sunshades seem costless on paper. It is only once developers try to comply that they — and homebuyers — see the true cost.

It is better to keep things simple. If we can get the price of clean energy down and the price of dirty energy up, economic incentives will solve much of the problem. Tempting as it might be to regulate every detail, the regulators themselves are not all-wise — and however frivolous air conditioning might seem to some commentators, it is best not to second-guess how it might be used. For theatres, it was the difference between staying open and shutting the doors. For you and me, it might mean being able to sleep at night and string a thought together during the day. For a vulnerable person, it might mean the difference between life and death.

Or maybe none of those things. Willis Carrier, after all, never designed air conditioning to keep anyone cool. Sackett & Wilhelms asked for help controlling the humidity, upon which the quality of their colour printing processes depended. The pleasantly cool air was just a side effect — even if it was a side effect that changed the world.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 10 June 2026.

When the Luddites smashed factory frames in a bid to defend their craft and livelihoods, the machines came out on top. Today, AI and automation threaten to wipe out skilled jobs and flood us with inferior products at a fraction of the price: is history going to repeat itself? FT journalist and author of We Are Not Machines Sarah O’Connor joins Tim to discuss her findings from the front lines about the future of work. Which professions are most at risk, and is there anything workers can do about it?  

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One of Labour’s key policy goals was to “kick-start economic growth”, a goal that would save a lot of trouble if they could achieve it, but one that was always going to be easier to say than to do.

Perhaps that is why the chancellor has looked for a quick crowd-pleaser. Her recent announcement of “Great British Summer Savings” (really?) promises to fleetingly cut VAT on children’s cinema tickets, children’s restaurant meals (a definitional headache) and visits to the zoo, along with free bus rides for under-16s and tariff suspensions aimed at giving us cheaper chocolate biscuits. (Families are more likely to need help when the energy crisis bites in the winter months, but it’s possible that the chancellor thinks that anything that happens after September will be somebody else’s problem.)

It would be giving this policy too much credit to call it a sugar hit; it’s more like a dusting of saccharine. A small, temporary, rather scattershot tax break is just moving small change around the economy. If you are prosperous enough to take your children to restaurants and amusement parks, you’ll save a few quid at best, and can look forward to the bill in due course. While you wait, you can ponder whether the chancellor really has nothing better to spend her scarce resources on.

Much of the money, in any case, is likely to be snaffled by the companies in question, which are under no obligation to pass on the tax cut. Those in the spotlight may decide that it would be prudent to make a show of doing so. Yet many theatres, theme parks and museums have no direct local competitors and will surely be tempted to pocket this brief summer bonus.

And if they do pass on the full benefit to customers? Merlin Entertainments, which runs Legoland, Alton Towers and Thorpe Park, has promised to do just that. But have you been to Alton Towers in a school holiday? Whatever families gain in lower ticket prices, they are likely to relinquish in longer waits for rides. The only real solution is to increase supply — an intriguing thought, no?

Still, it is nice to see rollercoasters on the front page, because for an insight into what ails the UK economy beyond the nearsighted unseriousness of successive governments, theme parks are not the worst place to start. They may have little practical significance but they make a fine symbol of the country’s ills: the UK’s rollercoasters are underwhelming for much the same reason that the UK economy in general is underwhelming.

I speak with some authority, as the proud parent of a teenage rollercoaster addict. Harford Junior has sampled much of what the UK’s rollercoaster scene has to offer, and now has his eyes firmly fixed on a theme park in Stockholm, another in Belgium, a third near Paris and a fourth near Krakow. (He’ll be lucky.)

This wanderlust speaks eloquently of the power of rollercoaster influencers on YouTube, but also of the fact that the UK just doesn’t have much to offer the connoisseur.

Thorpe Park has the extravagantly tall Hyperia and Alton Towers has The Smiler, in all its labyrinthine dystopian glory. Both are memorable coasters, but both have equally memorable queues.

Speaking as a man who has been dragged to more rollercoaster parks than you might imagine, my experience has been that the European parks are simply more pleasant experiences — shorter queues, better landscapes and themes, nicer food, longer opening hours. 

Compare Alton Towers with Europa Park in south-west Germany. Alton Towers is cheaper, which means it is overcrowded and the queues are absurd. A fast-track pass to skip them is available — for three times the price of admission, at busy times. Europa Park doesn’t sell a queue-jumping pass, and it has enough capacity that in my experience you don’t really need one.

These are subjective impressions, admittedly. But according to the Themed Entertainment Association, none of the world’s 25 most popular theme parks is in the UK. (There are four in Europe.) Only one UK theme park is in Europe’s top 10 — Alton Towers, in 10th place.

Why doesn’t Alton Towers just expand its capacity? A good question. It may be something to do with the limited competition: the UK’s three most popular theme parks are all run by the same operator. There are plans to build a Universal Studios theme park near Bedford, but major theme park openings in the UK are not a frequent occurrence.

It may be a response to planning restrictions — Alton Towers rides are obliged to stay below the tree line, lest they annoy the locals. Alton’s population is not much more than a thousand people, while the annual attendance at Alton Towers is well over two million. As so often in the UK, we let the planning-permission tail wag the economic dog.

The UK economy has suffered decades of under-investment from private and public sector alike, and you can see that reflected in our rollercoaster game. At least the fast-track passes serve as a shining example of how to profit in a low-growth economy: when life hands you long lines, make lemonade by charging people for the privilege of standing at the front of them.

So there we are. The rollercoasters don’t really matter, but what they symbolise does: a supply-constrained economy, hemmed in by rules and habits that don’t just make it hard to build something new and better, but make it hard even to imagine what “new and better” might look like. A brief, poorly targeted and poorly timed tax cut is no more likely to help than handing out fast-track passes is likely to reduce the average queue times at Alton Towers.

What might work? Treating the tax system strategically as a source of revenue and an encouragement to productivity would help — rather than using it as a fun-house source of distraction. Taxes are too complex and don’t raise enough revenue to meet any recent government’s spending plans, so cutting some randomly chosen tax rates for a few weeks is hardly addressing that problem.

But the real challenge lies in the nation’s supply side. Encouraging a few more theme parks would do wonders to improve the experience for coaster fans everywhere. And on the off-chance that we actually get serious? More power lines, houses, vehicle charging stations, roads, railway lines and power generation would be nice. I’ll cope without the discount on my chocolate biscuits.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 3 June 2026.

The children of North End, Boston, play in the shadow of an enormous steel tank of molasses. The thick, sticky sugar syrup is being used to make munitions for the First World War. When a worker notices dark molasses seeping from the tank, hewarns the company that there could be a leak. But the man in charge, Arthur Jell, has more important things to worry about: schedules to meet and profits to make. Besides, it’s only sugar. How dangerous could it be? 

This episode was released last year exclusively to members of the Cautionary Club. Along with monthly exclusive Cautionary Tales episodes, club members also receive ad-free listening, monthly video episodes and a monthly newsletter.

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Further Reading

The key source for this episode was Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (2019) by Stephen Puleo. This episode also drew on various contemporary news reports published between 1914 and 1931 in The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Daily News.

Other sources included:

“Brittle Fracture: The Great Molasses Flood”, Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach, by Stephen Ressler and The Great Courses Plus

The North End: A Brief History of Boston’s Oldest Neighborhood (2009) by Alex R. Goldfeld

Massachusetts Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival (2018) by Larry Pletcher, with additional stories by David J. Krajicek

“A sticky problem — a new light shone on Boston’s great molasses spillage” by Tony Fishwick, Loss Prevention Bulletin 264, Institute of Chemical Engineers,December 2018.

“Solving a mystery behind a deadly ‘Tsunami of Molasses’ of 1919” by Erin McCann, The New York Times, 26 November 2016.

“Move Fast And Break Things: Pros and Cons of the Concept“, MasterClass, 21 June 2022.

Six weeks later, someone asked the man to take off his shirt. He had a genetic condition, not a delusion. “It was in fact true: he was growing breasts.”

It was a lesson to learn: even experts — no, especially experts — can become sidetracked by elaborate ideas, overlooking the simple and direct approach. No surprise, then, that Dawes would become fascinated by the research of Ted Sarbin and Paul Meehl, psychologists who had studied the surprising power of simple statistical predictions in areas such as clinical diagnoses or academic performance.

Sarbin, for example, used a linear regression — almost the simplest statistical rule imaginable — to predict the college grades (GPA) of graduating students based on their high-school class rank and their score on the entrance test. That method was more accurate than the opinion of clinical psychologists armed with the same data and vastly more besides. Meehl found many more examples of cases where simple statistical rules beat the diagnosis or forecasts of the experts.

But just how simple could those rules be? A standard linear regression predicts an output based on a combination of various inputs. For example, the probability that an offender would be rearrested might be a function of their age, sex, number of previous convictions and severity of previous convictions. How much weight each factor gets is determined by a mathematical formula to most closely fit the historical data.

Instead, Dawes suggested what he called “improper” linear regression, where the weights weren’t optimised, but chosen arbitrarily — perhaps equally weighted, or even chosen at random.

To pick an example suitable for the Financial Times, think of the choice of an optimal investment portfolio. The output is the portfolio return; with the right allocation across different assets, we could maximise the predicted return for any given level of risk. Harry Markowitz, who shared a Nobel memorial prize in 1990, showed in the 1950s how to choose the weights in such a perfect portfolio. The Robyn Dawes school of thought says not to bother. Instead, follow a rule such as “Just invest your money equally in the 50 largest public companies” — or maybe even “half in stocks, half in bonds”.

That can’t possibly work, can it? Well, in the first job Markowitz took after publishing his theory, he had to decide how to allocate his pension contributions. He plumped for half in stocks, half in bonds. That’s an improper weight for you. But it’s not clear that Markowitz was wrong, even if he was self-contradictory: a 2009 paper by Victor DeMiguel, Lorenzo Garlappi and Raman Uppal found that the simple strategy of investing equally across a bunch of assets is surprisingly effective.

Over drinks after an academic conference discussion, a fellow panellist challenged Dawes: “Could you . . . use one of your improper linear models to predict how well my wife and I get along together?”

Dawes thought he could. He had colleagues who had been gathering data on sex and relationships, and he proposed the following improperly weighted predictor: that couples would probably describe their relationship as “happy” if they had sex more often than they had fights, and “unhappy” if the frequency of fights exceeded the frequency of sex.

Two variables, equally weighted — surely there’s a more accurate model than that? Yet the absurdly simple theory fit the evidence. A colleague had data on 12 unhappy couples; all of them fought more often than they had sex. Of 30 happy couples, 28 had sex more often than they had arguments. Subsequent small studies reached the same conclusion.

(An important caveat: ask the couples about the quality of the relationship first, and the quantity of sex and arguments afterwards, otherwise the totting-up may provoke a self-fulfilling crisis. One woman counted the sex, and the fights, and decided it was time to file for divorce.)

“The conclusion is that if we love more than we hate, we are happy; if we hate more than we love, we are miserable,” wrote Dawes in a 1979 article, “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making”, adding: “This conclusion is not very profound, psychologically or statistically. The point is that this very crude improper linear model predicts a very important variable.”

Why do these almost laughably simple models work? One answer is that while the weights are arbitrary, there is already some expertise smuggled into the choice of variables to throw into the mix. Dawes might have claimed that marital happiness was a function of average monthly rainfall in Nigeria; another simple model but not a very good one.

Another answer is that complicated-seeming outcomes often reflect fairly straightforward combinations of variables. It’s almost always a bad sign if an offender has a string of previous convictions, no matter what else might be true. And regardless of the psychodramas surrounding a couple’s relationship, it’s probably a good sign if they’re having plenty of sex.

But a third factor is that the typical dataset only captures a slice of what’s really going on. Marital happiness is hard to measure precisely. Risk is hard to measure precisely. Even the frequency of sex is harder to measure than it might seem — who’s counting, and what do they think counts? Alongside all this noise is the fact that everything changes.

As a result, the optimal-seeming estimate may prove overconfident as time goes by and more data arrives. A simpler, cruder method may be a bit more robust. Victor DeMiguel and his colleagues reckoned that in order for the allegedly optimal estimates to reliably outperform the simple equal-shares rule for a 50-asset portfolio, the analyst would need a dataset five centuries long.

The point is not that simple — “improper” — analysis is always best, just that it’s a surprisingly strong baseline. It doesn’t mess about or claim too much. It can be performed on a napkin in a bar, or jotted on a doctor’s notepad. Before unrolling a great analytical edifice, sometimes it’s worth asking to check under the shirt.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 27 May 2026.

Loyal readers might enjoy How To Make The World Add Up.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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In the early 1900s, Sir Arthur Vickers keeps the magnificent Irish Crown Jewels safe under lock and key at Dublin Castle. When the jewels disappear, the King rages, the police investigate, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gets involved. No one is ever charged and no jewels are ever recovered. Except, we have a very good idea of who took them, and why the truth has stayed buried. 

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Further Reading

This episode relied on three books about the Irish Crown Jewels affair. The classic account, from 1965, is Vicious Circle: The Case of the Missing Irish Crown Jewels by Francis Bamford and Viola Bankes. More recently, contrasting theories on the case are presented in The stealing of the Irish Crown Jewels: an unsolved crime, by Myles Dungan, and Scandal and Betrayal: Shackleton and the Irish crown jewels, John Cafferky and Kevin Hannafin. Brian Lacey’s book, Terrible Queer Creatures: Homosexuality in Irish History, provided additional context.

Ari Adut introduced his theory of scandal in an American Journal of Sociology paper from 2005, A Theory of Scandal: Victorians, Homosexuality, and the Fall of Oscar Wilde, and expanded it in book form in On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art.