7 février

On the last day of Carnival, Savonarola’s boys piled mirrors, wigs, cards, lutes, books and paintings into a stepped pyramid in the Piazza della Signoria and burned it. Florentines dated it 7 February 1496, before their new year; it is entered that way and falls in 1497.

Followers of the Earl of Essex paid the company 40 shillings above their usual takings to revive the play of Richard’s deposition on the eve of their rising. Essex marched into the City the next day and failed. The actor Augustine Phillips explained to the investigators that the play was old; the…

A contributor, the abbé de Prades, had defended a Sorbonne thesis that Jesuits and Jansenists alike called heretical. The council suppressed the sale of volumes one and two, but not the project: the third volume came out in 1753.

Lord Dalhousie deposed Wajid Ali Shah, the king of Awadh, for “misgovernment”. Awadh was the home of many of the Bengal Army’s sepoys, and the annexation is one of the grievances behind 1857.

Pan Am flight 101 from London was met by about 3,000 fans and 200 reporters at the airport, renamed for the murdered president seven weeks before. The press conference that followed was a string of one-liners.

Twelve years after they voted no by two to one, Swiss men approved women’s suffrage in federal votes by 65.7 per cent. In October eleven women were elected to the federal parliament.

That may have been one small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me. — Bruce McCandless On STS-41-B McCandless flew the nitrogen-jet Manned Maneuvering Unit to about 100 metres from Challenger, attached to nothing: the first untethered spacewalk.

British Airways’ G-BOAD flew New York to London in 2 hours 52 minutes 59 seconds, helped by a strong tailwind: the fastest crossing by any airliner.

Yusuf Hamied’s Indian generic maker offered Médecins Sans Frontières a three-drug combination for $350 a patient a year, against branded prices of $10,000 to $15,000. The offer broke the argument that treatment in Africa was unaffordable.

Europe’s biggest bank said its charge for bad debts would top 10.5 billion dollars, driven by the mortgage book of Household, the American lender it had bought in 2003. It was the first big bank to own up to the problem.

The most expensive Olympics yet. Russia topped the medal table, but the McLaren report found a state-run doping programme: urine samples were swapped through a hole in the laboratory wall at night. Russian athletes competed as neutrals at the next Winter Games.