October 5

Edward’s eldest son led an Anglo-Gascon army from Bordeaux to the Mediterranean and back, some 1,000 kilometres, burning towns and villages all the way. The walled Cité of Carcassonne held out, but its lower town was burned, and Narbonne’s after it. Rogers counts the raid among the most…

Gluck and his librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi cut the vocal display of Italian opera to serve the drama, and began with the myth of the first operas. The castrato Gaetano Guadagni sang Orfeo. Gluck set out the reform in his preface to Alceste (1769).

Thousands of Paris market women marched twenty kilometres in the rain to demand bread, and the National Guard followed. Next day the royal family was taken back to Paris, hailed as “the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy”. They never lived at Versailles again.

Van Helsing tells Seward: “Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina is changing.” He fears that if Mina can read what the Count sees, the Count can also learn what she knows, so she must be left out of the council. Seward agrees. At the meeting she excuses herself, and they are both relieved.

Mina has Jonathan promise on his word of honour: “Promise me that you will not tell me anything of the plans formed for the campaign against the Count.” He promises, “and as I said it I felt that from that instant a door had been shut between us”.

At the meeting for report, Van Helsing says the Count sailed on the Czarina Catherine, the one Black-Sea ship to leave on the tide, from Doolittle’s Wharf for Varna and up the Danube. Dock men remember a tall, thin, pale man in a straw hat with a great box, scattering money. Mina, as secretary,…

Over a cow pasture outside Dayton, Wilbur circled for 39 minutes 23 seconds and about 24 miles (39 kilometres), landing only when the fuel ran out. Then the Wrights stopped flying for two and a half years, to protect their patent while they looked for a buyer.

A French and British force landed in neutral Greece to help Serbia, too late and too small. It stayed, and grew to hundreds of thousands of men, many of them laid low by malaria.

Tsarevich Nicholas turned the first earth at Vladivostok. Crews worked from both ends and in sections between. By 1903 trains ran from Moscow to the Pacific, though by a short cut through Manchuria. The route lay wholly in Russia only when the Amur bridge at Khabarovsk opened in 1916. Moscow to…

The first single, a Lennon–McCartney song with McCartney on lead vocal and Lennon on harmonica. Martin had it recorded twice, once with Starr and once with the session drummer Andy White, Starr relegated to tambourine. It reached number 17.

The former Facebook product manager took tens of thousands of pages of internal research to the Wall Street Journal and the SEC, among them Instagram’s own finding that it made body-image problems worse for one in three teenage girls who had them. She told senators the company put “profits before…

Half the prize went to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”, the other half to Giorgio Parisi. The Academy credited Manabe with leading the development of physical models of the Earth’s…