EVENTS: in 1787, 14 years, 6 volumes, 1.5 million words and 8,000 footnotes later, Edward Gibbon completed the last lines of his monumental work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; in 1961 Michael Ramsey was enthroned as the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury in front of an invited congregation of more than 4,000, and with nearly 1,000 clergy robed and in the choir; in 1976 Palestinian terrorists hijacked a French airbus with 216 passengers aboard (about a third of them Israelis), and forced it to land the following day at Entebbe, Uganda; in 1984 a march of miners and supporting trade unionists passed off peacefully in London, organisers putting numbers at 50,000, while the police produced a more modest estimate of 10,000; in 1993 the US launched a cruise missile attack against the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service in retaliation for an alleged plot to assassinate former president George Bush in Kuwait the previous April.
BIRTHS: Louis XII, King of France 1498-1515, born in Blois, 1462; Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish nationalist, British MP and leader of the campaign for Irish home rule, born in Avondale, Co. Wicklow, 1846; Sir John Monash, civil engineer and First World War general, born in Melbourne, Australia, 1865; Helen Keller, blind, deaf and mute scholar, educator and author who was the subject of William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker, born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, 1880.
DEATHS: William Dodd, preacher and commentator on the Bible, was hanged for forgery in London, 1777; James Smithson, English scientist who provided the funds to found Washington DC’s Smithsonian Institution, died in Genoa, Italy, 1829; Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), who had been jailed on a charge of treason, was murdered in prison in Carthage, Illinois, 1844; Malcolm Lowry, novelist, short-story writer and poet, whose master work was Under The Volcano (1947), died in Ripe, East Sussex, 1957.