29 settembre

The see moved off the windy hill of Old Sarum to a green-field site by the Avon. The Earl and Countess of Salisbury laid foundation stones on 28 April 1220, and the church was consecrated on 29 September 1258: thirty-eight years for the whole building, which is why it looks all of a piece.

In 1698 Parliament had chartered a rival English East India Company in return for a £2 million loan to the state. Rather than fight each other to ruin, the two merged under an award by Lord Godolphin into the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies.

He tried to become an English gentleman, with an evening suit and lessons in dancing, French, elocution and the violin, then gave it up. A vegetarian restaurant on Farringdon Street and Henry Salt’s A Plea for Vegetarianism made him a vegetarian by conviction. He first read the Bhagavad Gita here,…

Absorbed in “that wonderful diary of Jonathan Harker and that other of his wife”, Seward lets dinner wait an hour, and when Mrs. Harker appears with her eyes flushed with crying he is moved and thinks of the tears that were denied him.

Van Helsing asks Arthur and Quincey to promise “in the dark” to let him do what he thinks good, and Arthur will give no promise against his honour or his faith. Then he asks them to come in secret to the churchyard at Kingstead and open Lucy’s coffin. The coffin is empty. Before dawn a white…

Arthur, Quincey and Seward call for Van Helsing, who brings a long leather bag, wearing black “by instinct”. At the tomb Van Helsing has Arthur take the stake and the hammer himself: “Brave lad! A moment’s courage, and it is done.” They seal the tomb afterwards.

Jonathan goes down to Whitby to trace the Count’s cargo; Billington’s son meets him at the station. The invoice reads “Fifty cases of common earth, to be used for experimental purposes”, and he takes copies of it and of the letters to Carter Paterson and their reply.

Mina, newly arrived at Purfleet, goes down to Dr. Seward’s study at his urging and finds him alone with the machine she has only read of: a phonograph, which she knows “from the description” but has never seen.

After dinner Seward brings back the phonograph and Mina takes her typewriter. She listens with the forked metal at her ears to his diary of Lucy’s illness and death while Seward sits with his back to her “so that I might be as free as possible”.

Montenegro, Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria took almost all that was left of Ottoman Europe, Salonica included. Edirne fell in March 1913 and was retaken in July, when the victors fell out among themselves.

Signed at Salonika. With Bulgaria out, the road to Constantinople and the Danube lay open, and Ludendorff told the Kaiser Germany must seek an armistice too.

Ten days after the Germans took Kyiv, a detachment of Einsatzgruppe C with German police and local auxiliaries shot 33,771 Jews in a ravine on the edge of the city in two days. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum counts about 2 million Jews murdered in such mass shootings.

Warned of his arrest as Denmark’s Jews faced deportation, Bohr crossed the Øresund by fishing boat and urged the King of Sweden to offer them asylum. Flown to Scotland in the bomb bay of a Mosquito, he passed out for want of oxygen, and reached Los Alamos as “Nicholas Baker”.

An all-veteran crew of five under Rick Hauck, in pressure suits for the first time since STS-4. They deployed a tracking and data relay satellite, and the redesigned boosters worked.

Thirty-two months without a shuttle flight. The booster joints were redesigned with a third O-ring and heaters, the crew got a bail-out system, and the shuttle stopped carrying commercial satellites. Endeavour was ordered to replace Challenger.

Hours before the House vote, the FDIC announced a deal it had never used before on a bank this size: Citi would take Wachovia’s banks for 1 dollar a share, with the FDIC covering losses above 42 billion dollars. It unravelled four days later.

Two-thirds of Republicans and 95 Democrats voted no on the rescue bill, five weeks before an election. As the tally climbed on the screens traders watched it and the Dow fell more than 700 points in minutes.

It closed at 10,365.45, down 7 per cent: the largest one-day point drop in its history until 2018, and about 1.2 trillion dollars of American shares gone in a day.