27 décembre

Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus raised it on the ashes of the Nika riots in under six years. Its dome fell in 558 and was rebuilt higher. Justinian’s famous “Solomon, I have outdone thee” comes from a legend written down centuries later.

A ten-gun survey brig sent to chart the coasts of South America, which came home by way of the Pacific and the Cape. Darwin was seasick for most of the voyage and spent more than three years of the five on land, riding across the pampas and the Andes while the ship surveyed. He sent home crates of…

The carpenter, Harry McNish, told Worsley that the ship’s articles ended with the ship, and that he no longer had to obey orders. Shackleton read the articles aloud to the men: their pay would run until they were in port. McNish went back to work; he was later denied the Polar Medal.

Other currencies were pegged to the dollar, and the dollar to gold at 35 dollars an ounce, convertible for foreign central banks. It worked only while the world trusted that America’s gold could cover its dollars, and by the 1960s it could not.

Soviet special forces, some in Afghan uniforms, stormed the palace outside Kabul and killed the Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin. Moscow installed Babrak Karmal in his place.

A day and a half later, with the magnitude now 9.0, the centre listed what its gauges had seen as the wave spread around the world: 2.6 metres at Manzanillo, Mexico, and a few centimetres at Hilo. Titov and colleagues later traced it into the Atlantic and the Arctic.