July 19

It started among shops by the Circus Maximus and burned for six days; of the city’s fourteen districts, three were levelled and seven left in ruins. It began on the anniversary of the Gauls’ burning of Rome. Rumour said Nero sang of the fall of Troy, not that he fiddled; he blamed the Christians…

About 300 people came to the Wesleyan Chapel. Of the Declaration of Sentiments’ resolutions, only the ninth, demanding “the elective franchise”, failed to pass unanimously; Frederick Douglass spoke for it and it carried. 100 people signed, 68 women and 32 men.

Renfield, with a colony of sparrows now, begs for a kitten “that I can play with, and teach, and feed—and feed—and feed!” Seward says it is not possible, and sees a “sudden fierce, sidelong look which meant killing”. That night Renfield kneels and begs for a cat, saying his salvation depends upon…

Six stages and 2,428 kilometres, the longest 471. Stages averaged over 400 kilometres, so the riders rode through the night and rested one to three days between them; the last stage left Nantes at nine in the evening.

By 2 hours 59 minutes 31 seconds, still the widest margin in the race’s history. L’Auto sold 65,000 copies a day that July, and Le Vélo closed the next year.

Yellow for the colour of L’Auto’s paper. Christophe pulled it on at the start in Grenoble, then lost the race when his fork broke again in the north. Firmin Lambot won; only ten riders reached Paris.

From a col west of Everest, Mallory and Bullock looked down on the Khumbu Glacier in forbidden Nepal and the valley above it. Mallory judged the Icefall “terribly steep and broken”. It was the way Everest would be climbed, thirty-two years later.

The Nazis hung confiscated modern art in cramped rooms with mocking slogans, across the Hofgarten from Munich’s official show of “German art”. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that more than 2 million people saw it in 1937. More than 20,000 works were seized from German museums that…

Helsinki finally held the Games it had lost in 1940. Paavo Nurmi, now 55, carried the torch into the stadium, and the Soviet Union and Israel competed for the first time.

The Soviet Union came to the Summer Games for the first time in Helsinki, and from then on the medal count was a scoreboard between two systems. It topped the table at six of the nine Summer Games it entered, the last in Seoul.

Ibbotson beat the Olympic 1500 metres champion Ron Delany. Three years after Oxford, four minutes was a standard for good milers rather than a wall, and the record was just a record again.

A year and eighteen days.

Three years. At the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 Landy took the athletes’ oath and won bronze in the 1500 metres.

Pak Doo-ik’s goal sent Italy home; their players were pelted with tomatoes on their return to Genoa. The crowd in Middlesbrough adopted the North Koreans as their own.

30 orbits in 59 h 30 min, each about two hours long.

A 6-minute burn of the main engine, on the far side of the Moon and out of radio contact. Houston learned it had worked when the spacecraft came back around on schedule.

Three days of coasting. To keep one side from baking and the other from freezing, the spacecraft turned slowly on its axis: the barbecue roll. One 3-second course correction was all it needed.

The first Games in Eastern Europe, with 80 nations, the fewest since 1956. Some Western athletes came anyway and marched under the Olympic flag. The mascot, Misha the bear, wept a tear in the card stunt at the closing ceremony.

Laurent Fignon, winner in 1983 and 1984, attacked near the top and took the jersey from Greg LeMond. He carried a 50-second lead into the last day.

The new Sejm and Senate, sitting together, elected General Wojciech Jaruzelski president with exactly the majority he needed. A few Solidarity deputies spoiled their ballots to let him through; the Round Table deal had assumed a Communist president.

The centennial Games, with all 197 national committees taking part for the first time. Muhammad Ali, his hands shaking with Parkinson’s, lit the cauldron.