May 6

The old cathedral, where French kings were anointed, burned on 6 May 1210. The chapter began a new one within a year, longer than the old, to hold the crowds at a coronation.

Unpaid imperial troops, many of them Lutheran landsknechts, stormed the walls; their commander, the Duke of Bourbon, was shot in the first assault. The Swiss Guard died covering the escape of the second Medici pope, Clement VII, to Castel Sant’Angelo. Someone scratched Luther’s name into a fresco…

Joseph Hooker had twice Lee’s numbers and a good plan; Lee split his smaller army twice and beat him. Lee’s greatest victory cost about 24,000 casualties (NPS).

A blizzard broke the moorings off Cape Evans and carried the ship out into the pack, with most of the shore party’s fuel, clothing and equipment still aboard. Ten men were left ashore, to live on what Scott’s expedition had left in the huts.

Held in the ice with her rudder smashed, the ship drifted north out of the Ross Sea for more than ten months under Joseph Stenhouse. She cleared the pack on 14 March 1916 and reached Port Chalmers under a jury rudder, in tow of a tug.

DELAG, founded at Frankfurt in November 1909 to fly Zeppelins, was the world’s first airline. Over nearly three decades commercial airships flew tens of thousands of passengers on more than 2,000 flights without an injury, until the Hindenburg burned.

Landing after a crossing from Frankfurt, the hydrogen-filled airship caught fire at the tail and was destroyed in about 32 seconds. Of the 97 people on board, 35 died, and one man of the ground crew: 36 in all. Newsreel film of the fire ended the passenger airship.

His last and longest detention, with Kasturba. Six days in, his secretary of twenty-five years, Mahadev Desai, died of a heart attack. He was released, ill with malaria, in May 1944. Both are commemorated in the palace grounds.

On the morning of the race Bannister ground his spikes on a grindstone in the hospital laboratory and rubbed graphite on them, so that the cinders of a wet track would not stick. Then he took the train from Paddington to Oxford, where he met the coach Franz Stampfl, who told him he might never…

Almost nine years at 4:01.4 made four minutes look like a wall, and the idea that the human body could not go under it spread with every year the record held.

After Helsinki three men made four minutes a public target: Roger Bannister in Britain, John Landy in Australia and Wes Santee in the United States. Landy ran 4:02 six times and could not find the last two seconds.

A gusty crosswind had blown all afternoon, and Bannister thought it would cost him the record. He watched the St George’s flag on the church tower beside the track. Minutes before the start it went slack, and he decided to run.

Event nine of a meeting between the Amateur Athletic Association and Oxford University. Bannister, Brasher and Chataway ran for the AAA; a crowd of about 3,000 watched.

The announcer, Norris McWhirter, drew out the result: a meeting and track record which, subject to ratification, would be a new English native, British national, all-comers’, European, British Empire and world record. “The time was three…” The rest was lost in the cheering.

Chris Brasher took the lead as pacemaker. Bannister, feeling the pace was too slow, shouted “Faster!”; Brasher ignored him and held it.

A 60.7-second second lap, still with Brasher in front. On schedule.

Chris Chataway had taken over from the tiring Brasher on the third lap, which was the slowest at 62.3 seconds. Bannister now needed a last lap under 59.5. He went past Chataway on the back straight with about 300 yards to go.

It lasted 46 days. Bannister won the Empire Games and European titles that summer and retired at the end of 1954 to become a doctor.

A last lap of 58.9 seconds. Bannister collapsed at the tape, and Hägg’s record of almost nine years fell by two seconds. Chataway was second, Tom Hulatt third.

On 2 May the Politburo's Nikolai Ryzhkov and Yegor Ligachev came to the commission's new base in Chernobyl town and ordered everyone out within 30 kilometres. Evacuations in Ukraine and Belarus reached about 116,000 people by the end of 1986. The area is still the Exclusion Zone.

The wrecked core stayed hot and kept releasing for ten days. UNSCEAR puts the release at about 1,760 petabecquerels of iodine-131 and 85 of caesium-137, carried north-west over Belarus and Scandinavia and then across Europe; it fell away sharply around 6 May.

Eleven boring machines dug three tunnels, two for trains and one for service, 50 kilometres long and 38 of them under the sea. At the peak 15,000 people worked on it. Nine or ten workers were killed, most of them British; accounts differ. The Queen and President Mitterrand opened it.

Kasparov opened with the offbeat 1.d3, hoping to lead the machine out of its opening book early.

The world’s biodiversity panel found around a quarter of species in the groups it assessed threatened, “suggesting that around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken”. The million is an extrapolation, including a tentative estimate for insects.

The world’s biodiversity panel reports that about a million species of animals and plants face extinction, many within decades. A 2011 study warned that at current rates losses could reach Big Five scale within a few centuries.