Daniel Hannan’s ”Inventing Freedom: How the English Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World” will be warm catnip for most Anglophiles and conservatives.

Artist/writer Edward Gorey was born on this day in 1925. Celebrated for his gothic visual style and humor, Gorey designed book covers for Doubleday before releasing his own series of projects beginning in the early 1960s. His work rode the wave of Edwardian and Victorian resurgence in the 1960s, which was popularized in the media by The Addams Family (1964-1966), Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-1967), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Wacky Races (1968-1970), and the John Steed character played by Patrick Macnee in The Avengers.