Events: In 1811 the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, was declared Prince Regent; in 1887 Verdi’s “Otello” received its world premiere at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan; in 1920 the RAF College at Cranwell, Lincolnshire, opened; in 1963 Maarten Schmidt identified red shifts in quasars; in 1982 Laker Airways collapsed with debts of £270 million; in 1983 the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was imprisoned in France, awaiting trial for crimes against humanity; in 1999 South African President Nelson Mandela made his last State of the Nation speech to Parliament before retiring in May.
Births: Mme de S?vign?, writer, born in Paris, 1626; Sir Robert Peel, Prime Minister 1834-35 and 1841-46, born in Bury, Lancashire, 1788; Johan Runeberg, poet who wrote the Finnish national anthem, born in Jakobstad, Finland, 1804; Dwight L. Moody, evangelist, born in Northfield, Massachusetts, 1837; John Boyd Dunlop, founder of the Dunlop tyre company, born in Dreghorn, Ayrshire, 1840; Sir Hiram Maxim, inventor of the first fully automatic gun, born in Sangerville, Maine, 1840; Joris-Karl Huysmans, novelist, born in Paris, 1848; Sir Arthur Keith, anatomist, physical anthropologist and curator of the Hunterian Museum, born in Aberdeen, 1866; Andr?-Gustave Citro?n, motor manufacturer, born in Paris, 1878; E.H. ‘Patsy’ Hendren, England and Middlesex cricketer, born in Turnham Green, Middlesex, 1889; Adlai Stevenson, politician and diplomat who helped found the UN, born in Los Angeles, California, 1900; William S. Burroughs, novelist of the Beat generation, born in St Louis, Missouri, 1914; Sir Alan Hodgkin, physiologist and biophysicist, who shared a 1963 Nobel Prize for work on the passage of impulses along individual nerve fibres, born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, 1914.
Deaths: Philipp Jakob Spener, theologian and founder of Pietism, died in Berlin, 1705; William Rossetti, writer, art critic and brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina, died in London, 1919; A. B. (“Banjo”) Paterson, Australian folk poet and author of Waltzing Matilda, died in Sydney, New South Wales, 1941; George Arliss, actor who won an Oscar for his 1930 portrayal of Disraeli, died in London, 1946; H.M. Tomlinson, novelist and essayist, died in London, 1958; Marianne Moore, poet, died in New York, 1972; Emeric Pressburger, Hungarian-born film producer and screenwriter, died in Saxtead, Suffolk, 1988.