3rd May

Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer prize for her first novel today in 1937. It was a sprawling Civil War epic called Gone With the Wind and was later turned into the Worst Film in History (and I am including John Carter and Titanic in the list) starring Clark Gable.

Bad luck, Maggie; you can't win 'em all.

In other news ...
Niccolo Machiavelli was born today in 1469, one of the most misunderstood Italians of all time (see Benito Mussolini, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Silvio Berlusconi etc etc). His book Il Principe (The Prince) written in 1515 is a brilliant description of the realpolitik of his day, a time when nobody's virtue was overnice. His works were banned in most European universities and he himself equated with the Devil - 'Old Nick' - which is incredibly unfair. He was, after all, telling it like it was.

He has achieved a kind of immortality though - of all the names of the 16th century Italian political scene, which one has come down to us as an adjective? His!

28th April

This was the day when the Allies got it wrong at Versailles in 1919. Britain, the USA and especially France demanded that Germany (who wasn't even called to the negotiating table) pay £6,600 million for having started World War One. Four things to note:

1. Germany didn't start World War One - Gavrilo Princip did.
2. Germany was broke and couldn't afford to pay reparations.
3. Woodrow Wilson the American President and John Maynard Keynes the economist wanted a much more affordable reparation settlement. They were ignored.
4. Georges Clemenceau - 'the tiger' - was a vengeful reprobate who consigned his own country to defeat and occupation twenty years later.

In other news ...
Benito Mussolini became yet another in a long line of dictators - Julius Caesar, Maximilien Robespierre, the Ceausescus, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Simon Cowell  (oops - typo! sorry!) - to meet their end stickily. It was 28 April 1945 and Il Duce and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were shot, kicked, spat at and hanged upside down for the benefit of the Italian mob and the cameras.