19. Januar

Henry ringed the largest city of Normandy and starved it. To stretch its food, the garrison drove thousands of poor townspeople out of the gates, and Henry would not let them through his lines: they died of hunger and cold in the ditch between the walls and the siege lines through the winter.

Prague had taken Figaro up in a way Vienna never did. Wolfgang to a friend: here “nothing is talked about but Figaro; nothing played, blown, sung or whistled but Figaro”. On 19 January he gave a concert that opened with a new symphony, K. 504, the “Prague”.

Three days after a court forced it to drop “Vélo” from its title, and with sales down from 30,000 a day to 20,000, the paper announced “the greatest cycling race in the whole world”. The idea was its cycling editor’s, Géo Lefèvre.

Anchor up at 8.45 a.m. on 5 December, the last link with civilization. Two days later, at 57° south, she met pack much farther north than expected. Six weeks of dodging floes took her past Coats Land and along 200 miles of new coast, which Shackleton named the Caird Coast after his chief backer.

The ship went where the pack went: south-west at first, then north and west round the bight of the Weddell Sea. In 281 days she was carried 573 miles in a straight line and 1,186 miles through Worsley’s observed positions.

Naval airships L 3 and L 4 crossed the North Sea at night and bombed Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, killing four people: the first air raid on Britain.

Launched faster than any spacecraft before it, it passed the Moon’s orbit in nine hours. It carries some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who found Pluto in 1930.

Japan became the fifth country to land on the Moon, with a pinpoint lander that came down about 55 metres from its target. One engine failed near the end, and it landed tipped on its nose.