29 december

Four of Henry II’s knights killed the archbishop in his own cathedral. He was made a saint in 1173, and his tomb became England’s greatest pilgrimage shrine: the offerings paid for much of the rebuilding that followed the fire of 1174.

Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli had stabbed Giuliano de’ Medici in the cathedral in the Pazzi conspiracy and fled to Constantinople. The Sultan sent him back, and he was hanged from a window of the Palazzo del Podestà. Leonardo sketched the body and listed his clothes, beginning “a small tan cap, a…

Stalled in the North, Britain turned south, counting on Loyalists and the fear of slave revolt to hold the colonies it retook. It became a brutal civil war between neighbours.

Three and a half months of waiting for the floe to drift north and the ice to open. They lived on seal and penguin, burned blubber, and in the end shot and ate the last of the dogs. Paulet Island passed out of reach to the west.

A second try at hauling the boats west, by night, when the surface was harder. In seven days they made seven and a half miles: at that rate, Shackleton reckoned, it would take over 300 days to reach land, and they had food for forty-two.

Six weeks as the guest of the publisher Kaizō-sha, lecturing from Tokyo to Fukuoka. Crowds met him at stations, and the diary he kept is full of delight in Japan and of prejudices about the other peoples he met on the voyage.

Anak Krakatau breaks the surfaceAnak Krakatau

Submarine eruptions in the caldera, between where Perboewatan and Danan had stood, pushed up a new cone, Anak Krakatau, “child of Krakatau”. The sea washed its first islands away; a lasting one stood from 11 August 1930.

After the Paris talks stalled, Nixon sent B-52s against Hanoi and Haiphong for eleven days, with a pause on Christmas Day. Fifteen B-52s were shot down. Hanoi counted 1,624 civilians killed; Bạch Mai hospital was among the places hit. The talks resumed in January.

The new leadership announced that the forced renaming of Bulgaria’s Turks would be reversed. Nationalist counter-demonstrations followed, but the names came back in 1990.

Six weeks from a beaten student march to a dissident in Prague Castle. Timothy Garton Ash, who watched it, put it to Havel that “in Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!”

Seven months after leaving prison, Václav Havel was elected president by a Federal Assembly still full of Communists, unanimously. Dubček had been made its chairman the day before.

The first to go, and the slowest: a negotiated handover in which the party kept the presidency and the army while Solidarity took the government. Its success told everyone else that Moscow would not send the tanks.

The close on the last trading day of the 1980s. The index had nearly tripled in four years; at its low in 2008–09 it had lost more than 80 per cent.

The Sejm amended the constitution: the country’s name dropped “People’s”, the party’s leading role went, and the white eagle got its crown back.