2 novembre

A triangle of cottonwood huts below the five earth-lodge villages at the Knife River, two Mandan and three Hidatsa: the trade centre of the northern plains, where Crow, Cheyenne, Assiniboine and British traders came for corn and goods. The Mandan fed the party through a winter that fell to 45…

Seward and Morris, three days on the road, have time only for the horses’ rest: “every moment is precious.”

Godalming has let Jonathan sleep, and he wonders where Mina and Van Helsing are: “They should have got to Veresti about noon on Wednesday.” In 1893, 1 November was a Wednesday, while Mina’s own entry puts her arrival at Veresti on 31 October, a Tuesday; the novel’s dates do not agree with its one…

They have taken turns driving all night. At dawn Van Helsing hypnotises Mina and she answers “darkness, creaking wood and roaring water”, so the river is changing as the launch ascends.

The country gets wilder, with the Carpathians towering in front, and Van Helsing says they will reach the Borgo Pass by morning. They have a rude four-in-hand, since the last horse has to go on with them.

About 8,000 troops of the Indian Army landed to take the port and were beaten by roughly a thousand of Lettow-Vorbeck’s men. Swarms of angry bees broke up both sides in the fighting, and the British left their weapons on the beach.

Russian and Ottoman armies fought over the mountains of eastern Anatolia in winters of deep snow. Russia took Erzurum in February 1916 and Trebizond that April; after the revolution its army dissolved and the Ottomans pushed on to Baku.

The 100-inch mirror was cast at Saint-Gobain in France. On the first night Hale and Walter Adams saw Jupiter six or seven times over: the sun had warmed the mirror through the open dome. They came back at three in the morning to a sharp image. With it Edwin Hubble would show that the galaxies lie…

Moscow fell after a week of street fighting between the Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee and the city duma’s Committee of Public Safety, whose officer cadets held the Kremlin for a time. Red artillery shelled it. The dead on both sides numbered several hundred; no reliable count exists.

Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia. Preachers in Jamaica, reading prophecy and Marcus Garvey’s call to look to Africa, hailed him as God returned, and the movement took his name.

Nineteen months of generals replacing one another in Saigon, while the Viet Cong grew and Hanoi began sending regular army units south. The revolving door stopped when Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Nguyễn Cao Kỳ took power together.

Three and a half years of bombing North Vietnam, meant to break Hanoi’s will by degrees. Johnson and his aides chose many of the targets themselves. The North dispersed its industry, rebuilt its bridges and kept the trucks moving.

P. W. Botha’s constitution gave coloured and Indian South Africans their own houses of parliament, each junior to the white house, and gave the African majority no house at all. Whites voted for it by about two to one. In the elections of August 1984 most coloured and Indian voters stayed home.