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An attempt in 1985 by the then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher to improve the security and political situation by signing an Anglo-Irish Agreement with the Dublin government led to sustained unionist protests.

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay,” warned the Anglo-Irish poet and novelist Oliver Goldsmith in 1777.

To understand where they, Bannon, Musk, Miller, Peter Thiel and others are taking us, ponder a prophecy from 18th-century Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, which the late Tony Judt adapted for the title of his final book: "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey/ Where wealth accumulates, and men decay."

Reading the work of the formerly famous Anglo-Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky, in his day seen as one of the most eminent scholars of the Victorian age, is like taking a disorienting ride in an intellectual hot-tub time machine.

On 4 October the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in Belfast was informed that police had raided Sinn Féin's offices at Stormont and arrested four high-profile party employees, including the head of administration in the party's Stormont Office, Denis Donaldson.