21. November

Begun when Prague became an archbishopric, under Charles IV, by Matthias of Arras. After his death in 1352 the work passed, by 1356, to Peter Parler, still in his twenties. His net vaults and the portrait busts in the triforium, his own among them, made the choir a model for Central Europe. The…

A three-page sequel to special relativity argued that a body giving off energy as radiation loses mass in proportion, the relation later written E = mc². He suggested radium salts might test it. Thirty-three years later Meitner used it to reckon the energy of a splitting uranium nucleus.

He was not sure of it: “the line of thought is amusing and seductive; but for all I know, the Lord might be laughing over it and leading me around by the nose”, he had written to Habicht. Proof came in 1932, when Cockcroft and Walton split lithium in Cambridge and the fragments carried off the…

In the evening the men heard Shackleton call out, “She’s going, boys!” From the look-out they watched her go down bows first, her stern in the air, a mile and a half away. In his private diary Shackleton wrote that he could not write about it.

She was 17, homeless, and had entered as a dancer, but lost her nerve and sang instead. She won, and within months was singing with Chick Webb’s band at the Savoy Ballroom, whose dance floor was open to Black and white dancers alike.

Wartime RAF photographs found by Michael Ward suggested a route from the Western Cwm. Shipton led a small party, with Ang Tharkay as sirdar and two New Zealanders who asked to join, one of them a beekeeper named Edmund Hillary. They forced a way nearly to the top of the Icefall.

The band had agreed to move to a rival club, the Top Ten. Harrison, 17, was too young to be in a club after midnight, and someone told the police. Days later McCartney and Best were arrested for setting fire to a condom in their old lodgings and deported too.

After the September coup Chile’s Estadio Nacional held thousands of prisoners, many of them tortured. The Soviet Union refused to play the qualifying play-off there; FIFA let the match go ahead, and Chile kicked off against nobody, walked the ball into the net and were through.