Anniversaries

Births: Pope Paul V, 1552; Francisco Gomez de Quevado y Villegas, poet and satirist, 1580; Samuel Prout, water-colour painter, 1783; Edward William Lane, translator of The Thousand and One Nights, 1801; William Carlos Williams, poet, 1883; Charles Tomlinson Griffes, composer, 1884; Sir Francis Charles Chichester, yachtsman and aviator, 1901; Sir Frederick Ashton, choreographer, 1906; Dolores Costello, actress, 1906.

Deaths: Tobias George Smollett, novelist, 1771; Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny, poet, 1863; Walter Savage Landor, writer, 1864; William Henry Fox Talbot, photographic pioneer, 1877; Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gothic architect, 1879; Ethel Mary Dell (Mrs G.T. Savage), romantic novelist, 1939; Ruth Benedict, anthropologist, 1948; Dame Lilian Braithwaite, actress, 1948; Friedrich Adolf Paneth, chemist, 1958; Katherine Anne Porter, novelist, 1980; Professor Sir Karl Raimund Popper, philosopher, 1994.

On this day: Edinburgh was occupied by the Jacobites under the Young Pretender, 1745; the Constitution of the United States of America was signed, 1787; the frigates Briton and Tagus, under Sir Thomas Staines and Captain Pipon, touched at Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, and found the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, 1814; an English eccentric announced in a San Francisco newspaper that he had became Norton I, Emperor of America, 1859; the indecisive Battle of Antietam (American Civil War) was fought, 1862; the Mont Cenis railway tunnel, Switzerland, opened, 1871; the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed, 1900; the operetta Viktoria and Her Hussar was performed in London for the first time, 1931; the first long-playing records were demonstrated in New York, but the venture failed, 1931; Poland was invaded by the Soviet Union, 1939; the 1st British Airborne Division landed at Arnhem, 1944; the first meeting took place of the North Atlantic Treaty Council, 1949; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, North and South Korea, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia were admitted to the United Nations, 1991.

Today is the Feast Day of St Columba of Cordova, St Francis of Camporosso, St Hildegard, St Lambert of Maastricht, St Peter Arbues, St Robert Bellarmine, St Satyrus of Milan, Saints Socrates and Stephen and St Theodora.