As it's a long holiday weekend here in the UK, I relaxed with a terrific mystery set in Victorian London, featuring Joseph Bazalgette, Charles Darwin, Charles Babbage, Florence Nightingale and above all the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel (just pipped at the post by Winston Churchill in a 2002 BBC vote for the Greatest Britons). The book is Tony Pollard's  The Minutes of the Lazarus Club.  The hero is a surgeon, and the book has all the naturalism about dissections and body parts one might expect from an author who runs the University of Glasgow's Centre for Battlefield Archaeology. It's a page turner too and ideal for others who, like me, have a passion for the technological surge of the Victorian era, the difference engines, steam engines, railways and not forgetting the first London sewerage system.

It set me pondering about the way the Victorians achieved a combination of private gain and public achievement in a manner which was chaotic and disruptive at the time but, from our perspective, appears incredibly robust. The past quarter century has profoundly failed to bring about a happy union between private and public domains, and it strikes me as an urgent and serious challenge now. How should we organize our societies for the greatest mutual benefit? We can't even create a robust sense of public domain in the online world, never mind the material. Yet you only have to look at a superb Victorian building like Manchester's Town Hall, as I did on Monday, to realize that when private and public interests can be aligned, anything is possible.