These are the sources for the factual claims in The Line on the Hull, Frontline Club Pamphlets No. 1, section by section. Each entry quotes the words in the pamphlet, then gives the source. Where the pamphlet sums up a finding, the note gives the source’s own words. The book’s sources are at trueregard.com/sources; confirmed corrections are on the corrections page; the pamphlets’ bet is on the Register of Bets.
Checked September 2026. Web addresses change: if a link has moved, the citation will find the document. Where a passage describes what the author saw himself, it rests on his own reporting.
autocracies outnumbered democracies, ninety-two to eighty-seven. V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, ‘Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era?’, 10th edition, March 2026. The report says the world had 92 autocracies and 87 democracies at the end of 2025, and that 74 per cent of the world’s population, about 6 billion people, live in autocracies. The counts are on V-Dem’s Regimes of the World measure. V-Dem is based in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
stand them on columns: Napoleon in Paris. Fondation Napoléon, napoleon.org, ‘Vendôme Column’. The Vendôme Column is topped by a statue of Napoleon, and the dedication on its base refers to ‘Napoleon the Great’. The present statue is a Second Empire copy of the original.
the version that replaced it in 2010, the finding is flatter. Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry (Chair: Sir Wyn Williams), ‘Final Report, Volume 1’, HC 1119, 8 July 2025, para 1.5. Para 1.5: Horizon Online replaced Legacy Horizon in 2010 and was ‘from time to time’ afflicted by bugs, errors and defects that showed illusory gains and losses; ‘a number of employees of Fujitsu and the Post Office knew’. Para 1.6 defers to a later volume the question of the version in use today.
the wardmote as a meeting with the local councillors. City of London Corporation, ‘Annual Wardmotes’. Each of the City’s wards still holds its wardmote, a public meeting with its elected members.
Magna Carta under glass in London. British Library, ‘Magna Carta’. The British Library holds an original of the 1215 charter, one of only four to survive, and a 1225 reissue.
Into Sarajevo on the airlift we called Maybe Airlines. The author’s own experience. Maybe Airlines was the nickname for the airlift in and out of Sarajevo during the siege. Journalists and the people who organised the flights used it, and it was on a sign where passengers checked in. The author flew on it.
James Madison, the father of the American constitution. The White House (archived, 2009 to 2017), ‘James Madison’. The page says he was later called the ‘Father of the Constitution’ and that Madison himself called it ‘the work of many heads and many hands’.
enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Bill of Rights Institute, ‘Federalist No. 10’, James Madison, 1787. The pamphlet gives this as reported sense, without quotation marks, and its words match Federalist No. 10: ‘Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.’
glib and marvellous at parties and loved strangers and world hunger. Fallon, J., ‘Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath’, The Moth, recorded 4 June 2011, transcript. The pamphlet reports her words without quotation marks, and the substance matches The Moth: ‘You don’t connect to people’, ‘kind of cold’, ‘superficially glib’, great at parties and a ‘disappointing person to be around’.