TODAY

EVENTS: in 1943 Allied troops landed in Sicily; in 1947 the engagement was announced of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten; in 1970 David Broome, riding Beethoven, became the first Briton to win the world showjumping championship; in 1985 a Greenpeace crew member died when the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was blown up and sunk by French secret agents in New Zealand.

BIRTHS: John Calvin, Protestant reformer, born Jean Cauvin in Noyon, France, 1509; Aphra Behn, dramatist and novelist, thought to have been born in Wye, Kent, 1640; Marcel Proust, author of the semi-autobiographical A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, born in Auteuil, near Paris, 1871; Carl Orff, composer of the oratorio Carmina Burana (1937), born in Munich, 1895.

DEATHS: Hadrian, Roman Emperor 117-138, died in Baiae, Italy, 138; El Cid, military leader and Spanish national hero, died in Valencia, 1099; William of Orange, German Count of Nassau, who inherited the French principality of Orange was assassinated in Delft, 1584; Clement C. Moore, author of A Visit from St Nicholas (1822), died in Newport, Rhode Island, 1863; Albert Chevalier, music-hall entertainer, died in London, 1923; Robert Earl Hughes, at 76 stone the world’s heaviest man, died in Bremen, Indiana, 1958.

TOMORROW

EVENTS: In 1818, John Keats visited Robert Burns’s birthplace in Alloway, Ayrshire, and composed his sonnet, Written in the Cottage Where Burns Was Born; in 1897 the scientist Saloman Andrée and two fellow Swedes left Spitsbergen by balloon in a doomed attempt at Arctic exploration by air; in 1975 Chinese archaeologists announced the uncovering of a “terracotta army” near the ancient capital of Xian.

BIRTHS: Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland 1306-29, born in Turnberry, Ayrshire, 1274; Don Luís de Góngora y Argote, poet, born in Córdoba, Spain, 1561; Thomas Bowdler, self-appointed Shakespearean censor, born near Bath, Somerset, 1754; John Quincy Adams, sixth American President 1825-29, born in Braintree, Massachusetts, 1767; E. B. White, children’s writer known for Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, born in Mount Vernon, New York, 1899; Yul Brynner, actor, born in Sakhalin, off Siberia, 1915.

DEATHS: Germain Sommeiller, the engineer responsible for the eight-mile tunnel through the Alps under Mont Cenis, 1857-70, died in Saint Jeoire, Haute Savoie, 1871; Alfred Dreyfus, French army officer and victim of anti-Semitism, died in Paris, 1935; George Gershwin, composer, died in Hollywood, 1937; Par Lagerkvist, playwright, novelist and poet (Nobel laureate 1951), died in Stockholm, Sweden, 1974; Barbara Wootton (Baroness Wootton of Abinger), sociologist, died in 1988; Laurence Olivier (Baron Olivier), actor and first director of the National Theatre, died in Steyning, West Sussex, in 1989.