Anniversaries

Births: Josephine de Beauharnais, wife of Napoleon, 1763; Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, playwright novelist and actor, 1876; Anna Akhmatova (Anna Andreyevna Gorenko), poet, 1889; Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1894; Dr Alfred Charles Kinsey, sex investigator and author, 1894; Winifred Holtby, novelist, 1898.

Deaths: Vespasian (Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus), Roman emperor, 79; Mark Akenside, poet and physician, 1770; James Mill, philosopher and economist, 1836; Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope, traveller and eccentric, 1839; Horatio MacCulloch, landscape painter, 1867; Cecil James Sharp, founder of the English Folk Society, 1924; Mark Gertler, painter, 1939; Michael Arlen, novelist, 1956; Kay Kyser (James Kern Kyser), bandleader and quizmaster, 1985.

On this day: all provincial printing offices were closed by order of the Star Chamber, 1585; a treaty of peace and friendship with the American Indians was signed by William Penn, 1683; the first evening newspaper, Dawks's News-Letter (appearing three times a week) was published in London, 1696; Keble College, Oxford, opened, 1870; the German Social Democratic Party published an article in the newspaper Vorwarts calling on their government to sue for peace, 1915; the British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the Soviet Union, 1951; agreement was reached in Luxembourg on the terms of Britain's entry into the Common Market, 1971.

Today is the Feast Day of St Agrippina, St Etheldreda or Audrey, St Libert or Liebert, St Thomas Corsini and St Thomas Garnet.