Anniversaries

Births: Cardinal Jules Mazarin (Giulio Mazarini), statesman, 1602; George Green, mathematician and physicist, 1793; James Abbott McNeill Whistler, painter and writer, 1834; Emmeline Pankhurst, social reformer and suffragist, 1858; Owen Wister, novelist, 1860; Gustav Klimt, art nouveau painter, 1862; Paul Walden, chemist, 1863; Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, traveller and archaeologist, 1868; Gerald Finzi, composer, 1901; Woody Guthrie, folk singer, 1912.

Deaths: Philip II Augustus, King of France, 1223; Francisco Antonio Gabriel Miranda, Venezuelan nationalist leader, 1816; Madame de Stael (Anne-Louise- Germaine Necker), writer, 1817; Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, Boer leader, 1904; Sir William Henry Perkin, chemist and inventor of aniline dyes, 1907; Sir Apirana Turupa Ngata, Maori leader, 1950; Jacinto Benavente y Martinez, playwright and poet, 1954; Faisal II, King of Iraq, assassinated 1958; Adlai Ewing Stevenson, statesman, 1965; Konstantin Georgiyevich Paustovsky, writer and journalist, 1968.

On this day: during the French Revolution, the Bastille in Paris was stormed, 1789; the Oxford Movement was launched after a sermon by John Keble, 1833; the first ascent of the Matterhorn was made by Edward Whymper, 1865; dynamite was first demonstrated by Alfred Nobel, 1867; the first BBC television play, The Man With a Flower in His Mouth, was transmitted, 1930.

Today is Bastille Day in France and the Feast Day of St Camillus de Lellis, St Deusdedit of Canterbury, St Marcellinus or Marchelm, St Ulric of Zell.