31 luglio

On the last night, Plutarch says, the city heard music and revellers pass through it and out of the gate facing the enemy, as if Dionysus, Antony’s god, were leaving him. Cavafy made a poem of it in 1911.

An English captain’s seizure of Fougères broke the truce, and Charles declared war. Town after town opened its gates rather than face the French guns, and Normandy fell in a year after thirty years of English rule, ending with Cherbourg.

Fifteen stages round the edge of France. In January Steinès had crossed the Tourmalet on foot in snow, been found by a search party at three in the morning, and wired Desgrange: “Road passable to vehicles.” Octave Lapize won.

The Third Battle of Ypres. Haig aimed for the Belgian coast; the heaviest rain in years turned the shelled fields into a swamp in which men and horses drowned. Canadians took the ruins of Passchendaele village in November. Each side lost roughly a quarter of a million men, though the figures are…

At the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences Trofim Lysenko denounced Mendelian genetics as bourgeois, and on the last day announced that the Central Committee had approved his report. Geneticists recanted or were dismissed, and genetics was banned in the Soviet Union until the mid-1960s. Its…

George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev signed the first treaty to cut, not just cap, strategic nuclear arms, to 6,000 warheads on 1,600 launchers each.

Ralph Cioffi’s funds had borrowed heavily to buy mortgage-backed securities. Their investors lost about 1.6 billion dollars. Cioffi and his colleague Matthew Tannin were the first Wall Street managers tried over the crisis; a jury acquitted them in 2009.

The “Ebola ça suffit” trial borrowed the smallpox campaign’s method, vaccinating the contacts of each new case. Interim results showed no cases among those vaccinated at once from ten days after vaccination, against 16 among those whose vaccination was delayed.