One morning during the hot summer of 1908, Thomas Hardy looked in on his club, the Athenaeum, to check his post and to pen a grievance. ‘I am getting tired of London, & think of returning Monday, or perhaps Tuesday – Monday if I can,’ he advised his bed-ridden wife, dithering and perhaps a little depressed to realise that some things get worse before they get better: ‘I have to lunch at the House of Commons tomorrow, which is my last “function” I think.’ No written evidence survives to tell us anything juicy about his attendance at this ‘function’ – the inverted commas probably say it all – so for Hardy we may assume that lunch went down without a hiccup, an unremarkable end to a summer spent railing between Dorset and the capital. Yet we can picture that function. Filed away in the House of Commons Library for the best part of seventy years until gifted to the National Portrait Gallery in 1974, a sequence of photographs remains a testament to life on parliament's river terrace, and shows Thomas Hardy at his function. It is easy to spot him: he is the only one who has refused to dispense with his hat, and in the first properly choreographed picture he appears to be glancing out of shot, against the grain of the composition (Figure 1.1). The glance, as it turns out, is an expression of movement, because in the next picture he is to be seen nearing the end of the back row, having followed his nose and flouted the instructions of the camera-eye (Figure 1.2). We will never know the cause of this disruptive behaviour – impatience, whimsy, a call of nature – but it is quite possible that the restive writer had spied a kindred spirit at the edge of the gathered party. For there, positioned at the end of the front row, can be seen a figure no more used to standing still than Thomas Hardy, and one who may also have deemed himself an outsider in this political company: the inventor, engineer and entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi, whose contribution to ‘wireless telegraphy’ had already made waves in the British press.