18 april

A scribe at Christ Church, Canterbury, drew the comet of 1145 in the margin of the Eadwine Psalter, a great illustrated book of psalms made there. It is one of the earliest pictures of the comet drawn from life. The book is now at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Julius laid it for Bramante’s domed Greek cross, and the old basilica of Constantine came down around it, which earned Bramante the nickname Maestro Ruinante. The church took 120 years and a dozen architects.

Asked the day before whether he stood by his books, Luther had begged a day to think. Now he answered that his conscience was captive to the Word of God and he could not go against it. The famous “Here I stand, I can do no other” appears in early printed accounts but probably was not spoken.

A narrative poem written while the playhouses were shut, and his first work in print. He dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton as “the first heire of my inuention”. The printer, Richard Field, was a Stratford man. It went through ten editions in his lifetime, more than any of his plays; Lucrece…

Warned that the regulars were marching on Concord’s military stores, Paul Revere rowed to Charlestown and William Dawes took the land road out of Boston. Both reached Lexington; Revere was captured on the road to Concord, and Samuel Prescott carried the alarm on.

A tenant farmer, Raj Kumar Shukla, had pursued him to bring him to Bihar, where European planters forced tenants to grow indigo on three-twentieths of their land. Ordered out of the district, he told the magistrate at Motihari he would disobey and accept the penalty. The case was dropped and an…

Foreign minister Milyukov assured the Allies that Russia would fight on to “decisive victory”. When the note was published two days later, armed soldiers and workers marched on the government. Milyukov and the war minister Guchkov were gone within a fortnight.

An aortic aneurysm burst, and he refused surgery: “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” He died after one in the morning, murmuring in German to a nurse who did not understand. His ashes were scattered in secret; the…

The new Institute for Advanced Study housed him in the university’s Fine Hall until its own Fuld Hall opened in 1939. He spent the rest of his life on a unified field theory that never came, and told a colleague he went to the Institute only for the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.