19. August

Since well I’ve played my part, all clap your hands. — Augustus, to his friends He died at Nola after more than forty years as sole ruler, asking whether he had played the comedy of life well.

Renfield, who has just changed, refuses to talk to the attendant: “I don’t want to talk to you: you don’t count now; the Master is at hand.” Later that night he escapes through the window and is found in the grounds of Carfax, pressed against the chapel door: “I am here to do Your bidding, Master.…

News of Jonathan at last: he has been ill and is in a hospital at Buda-Pesth, and Mr. Hawkins sends on a Sister’s letter. Mina leaves in the morning to nurse him and to marry him there if need be. Lucy will take her trunk to London.

Sergei Diaghilev’s company opened its first Paris season at the Théâtre du Châtelet and toured for twenty years without a home theatre. It commissioned Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, Satie and Poulenc, with designs by Picasso and Matisse. It ended with Diaghilev’s death in Venice.

Three years to the day after Barbarossa, the Red Army struck in Belorussia and in weeks destroyed Army Group Centre, a worse German defeat than Stalingrad. On 17 July some 57,000 German prisoners were marched through Moscow.

The first animals to reach orbit and come back alive, after 17 orbits in a Vostok test capsule. In 1961 Khrushchev gave one of Strelka’s puppies, Pushinka, to Caroline Kennedy.

The first mile record timed to the hundredth: electric times were accepted for records that year.

Hungarian opposition groups and Otto von Habsburg’s Pan-European Union held a picnic at the border, with a gate to be opened for three hours. East Germans had been told of it by leaflet. About 600 of them ran through into Austria; the guards did not shoot.

Hardliners put Gorbachev under house arrest at his holiday dacha in Crimea and sent tanks into Moscow. Boris Yeltsin climbed onto one outside the Russian parliament and called for resistance. The coup collapsed in three days; three young men died in the streets.

The Atlanta rapper named his album after the “trap”, the house where drugs were sold. The word became a genre: rolling 808 hi-hats and heavy bass that by the 2010s had spread from Atlanta to pop and dance music everywhere.