28th June

The most bizarre incident in History occurred occurred today in 1950 when an American soccer team beat an English football team 1-0. You must understand, younger reader, that this was a time when nobody beat a British team, still less the Americans.

The reason, by the way, why no one has ever beaten an American football team playing American football (as opposed to soccer) is that no one understands the rules.

In other news ...
On this day in 1914, a 19 year old student, Gavrilo Princip, was sitting outside a cafe in Sarajevo. He was a member of a revolutionary gang, the Black Hand and was feeling pretty pleased with himself because he had just heard bombs going off across the city and felt pretty sure that his terrorist group's target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, must be dead.

Imagine his surprise then when an open-topped car drove slowly past carrying Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. So what did Gavrilo do? He shot both the car's occupants dead and caused millions more deaths in World War One.

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.