Coming second

Who was the second prime minister? Everyone knows Robert Walpole was the first. Firsts get all the fame and glory. But what about the poor seconds, elbowed into the shadows of history? Isn’t it time they were given some love? Step forward, the Earl of Wilmington, PM from 1742 to 1743. Let us celebrate the fact that his country house in Warwickshire appeared as a monastery in Carry On Camping — and was the inspiration for Croft Manor, Lara’s childhood home in the Tomb Raider games.

Likewise, no one knows very much about James Garfield, the second US president to be assassinated. I certainly didn’t until I researched him for my new book, The Book of Seconds. I didn’t know that he could write in Latin with one hand and, simultaneously, in Greek with the other. I didn’t know that he took weeks to die: a bullet remained lodged in his body, and Alexander Graham Bell invented a metal detector to find it.