With 4 days left in my October 2016 trip to the USA I had arranged for myself an excursion to a third WHS of the trip. I caught a subway and a bus to New York’s domestic-only La Guardia airport to catch an American Eagle flight 300 miles southwest to the city of Charlottesville, Virginia.

On arrival I took a fairly expensive taxi to my hotel in the city and had a walk around the university's tranquil campus. I read in Christopher Hitchens' biography of Jefferson that his motivation for building the university was to limit the exposure of Southern minds to what he perceived as the propaganda of Northern universities in New England.

The next morning I took another costly cab to Monticello, a few miles outside town. There is a nearby hill that rises higher than Monticello, meaning whoever occupies it would have a great view of Jefferson’s estate. In recent years a developer announced plans to build condos there, but the trustees of Monticello – determined to prevent the surrounding area being despoiled – raised $15 million to buy the land themselves. By happy coincidence, $15 million is exactly the same amount that Jefferson as president paid Napoleon’s France in 1803 to purchase all the lands west of the Mississippi, doubling the size of his country at the stroke of a pen.