17th April

A long time ago, when children were literate enough to appreciate corny historical jokes, Messrs Sellar and Yeatman wrote their immortal 1066 And All That. One of the many gems in the book concerned Martin Luther and his diet of worms. The Diet was actually, for the record, an assembly held in the German town of Worms to decide on the fate of Martin Luther, who appeared on a charge of heresy on this day in 1521.

Today, 83% of children think Martin Luther was a civil rights leader who had a dream and was assassinated in 1968. The other 42% don't think at all.

In other news ...
Sir Leonard Woolley, the archaeologist, was born today in 1880. Best known for his excavations at the Persian city of ... um ... Ur, he was the first to find a frozen mammoth and gave his name to it. Several more Leonard mammoths have been found since.

There has been serious progress made on cloning a mammoth from material found in the permafrost. I hope this doesn't really take off, not only because the thought of herds of mammoths sweeping majestically across the landscape of Sussex can only bring problems such as piles of mammoth poo and long tailbacks of traffic caused by one taking its ease on the A23, but on a more personal level, I don't think the catflap is big enough for when Metternich brings one down in the shrubbery.

22nd March

Anthony van Dyck was born today in 1599. Famous for his court portraits of Charles I. He later went on the star in his father's long-running TV series Diagnosis Murder.


In other news ...
Today in 1906 the first international rugby match took place with England beating France 35-0. The England team had already scored pretty heavily at Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt, Ramillies, Malplaquet, Sahagun, Badajoz, Toulouse and Waterloo. An earlier result at Hastings, where the French unaccountably won, was deemed to be because they played with the roof open.