24 september

Harold marched north with his household troops, gathering men as he went, and on the Sunday came to Tadcaster, about 300 kilometres from London. There he drew up his men; the Norwegians, a day’s march away, had no idea he was in the north.

“I left Milan for Rome on 24 September 1513 with Giovan Francesco de’ Melzi, Salaì, Lorenzo and il Fanfoia.” He was sixty-one. Melzi, a young Lombard nobleman, had joined him about 1507 and stayed to the end.

Charles d’Amboise, Louis XII’s governor, borrowed him from Florence for three months and kept him; Florence complained he had taken its money and done little. Louis called him “our painter and engineer in ordinary”. Anatomy, water and geology filled these years more than painting.

From the new Spanish town of San Miguel, near Piura, with 168 men, 62 of them on horseback. Atahualpa’s envoys met them on the way and invited them up into the mountains; the Spaniards climbed the Andes without a fight.

Smallpox, measles, typhus and other new diseases, with war, famine and forced labour. Estimates vary widely. Cook and Borah put central Mexico at about 25 million in 1518 and just over 1 million by 1605; Noble David Cook put Peru at about 9 million in 1520 and about 1.3 million by 1570. Lower…

Convicted in a hasty trial, he was beheaded in the main square before a great crowd, despite pleas for mercy from the clergy. The last Sapa Inca was dead, and Toledo set about rebuilding the Andes as a Spanish colony.

With a few hundred men left, Saigō made a last stand on the hill above Kagoshima. Wounded, he was beheaded by a comrade. The government that fought him pardoned him in 1889, and his statue has stood in Ueno Park since 1898.

Van Helsing, “by the kindness of Lord Godalming”, has read Lucy’s letters and papers and found Mina’s. Marked “Confidence”, he writes: “Oh, Madam Mina, by that love, I implore you, help me.” He will come to Exeter at once, and asks her not to enlighten Jonathan, “lest it may harm”.

After the journal, Mina asks herself whether Jonathan wrote it in his fever, but remembers “that man we saw yesterday”. She decides to transcribe it on her typewriter so it is ready for other eyes “if required”. She writes that “that fearful Count was coming to London”.

Mallory, Bullock and Wheeler, with three Sherpas, crossed the Lhakpa La and climbed to the North Col, about 7,000 metres. Above them the wind was tearing snow off the North Ridge. Mallory saw a way to the top, and turned back.

Ambedkar gave up separate electorates in exchange for 148 reserved seats in the provincial legislatures, against 71 under the Award, chosen by all voters. With Gandhi’s life at stake he had little choice. In 1945 he wrote: “There was nothing noble in the fast. It was a foul and filthy act.”

Gandhi fasted in Yerwada jail against separate electorates for the untouchable castes. B. R. Ambedkar gave way, and got reserved seats instead, more of them than the British award had offered.

A drill on the Sea of Fertility filled a small capsule with 101 grams of soil, which parachuted onto the Kazakh steppe: the first sample returned from another world without a crew, fourteen months after Apollo 11.

Early labels such as “gay-related immune deficiency” were dropped for a name that said nothing about who was ill: acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The CDC first used it in print in this report, by which time cases had also been reported in people with haemophilia, injecting drug users and…

The Canadian beat Carl Lewis in a world record. Three days later he was stripped of the gold after testing positive for the steroid stanozolol, and Lewis was awarded it.

India became the first Asian nation to reach Mars orbit, and the first country to do it on its first try. Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched from mission control in Bengaluru.

The capsule held 121.6 grams of the asteroid Bennu, the largest asteroid sample yet. Two fasteners jammed the lid, and it took curators months to get the last of it out.