Alas! It is 200 years since the death of Giovanni Battista Belzoni, who studied hydraulics, wanted to be a monk, became a barber, then a circus strongman, and was eventually employed to remove a huge bust of Ramesses II from Egypt and take it to the British Museum. He was…

Happy eighth anniversary of the opening night of Funny Girl at the Menier Chocolate Factory in south London, a production which gave rise to one of the best pullout quotes ever seen by human eyes. Mind you, 47 years ago, and also on this day, that sort of muck was…

1 December is the day we must mark the sad passing 502 years ago of Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici — or Pope Leo X, as he was also known. Leo was not one of those popes memorable for a sordid life, but is known for two things. Firstly, this: …

So, today it is both the 23rd anniversary of news breaking of Sooty the guinea pig’s sexual excesses, and of Edmund ‘Ironside’ II getting done in by being stabbed up the bum while on the privy. Possibly. Obviously, we’re starting with the ‘Romeo Rodent’… Or, at least, it was 30…

So, happy 48th anniversary to Melody Maker’s review of Bohemian Rhapsody: Queen, with a suitably baroque vocal orchestration, contrive to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance But also: happy 75th anniversary of the release of Scott of the Antarctic, whose filming…

To begin with, happy 115th anniversary to this entirely reasonable cat: And: happy it-would-have-been-your-119th birthday, Nancy Mitford, a woman who described Jacob Rees-Mogg in a novel written 37 years before he was born: That’s really Lord Lewes of the Foreign Office in 1932’s Christmas Pudding, one of her early…

27 November, eh? So… 54th anniversary of the first performance of Mahna Mahna on Sesame Street — followed three days later by the Muppets doing it on Ed Sullivan, which you can learn more about via this marvellous thread: You may also enjoy this later use of the song…

Well, if it’s 26 November, it must be the 137th anniversary of a divorce case so saucy and notorious it not only gave us the phrase ‘what the butler saw’, but newspapers actually suppressed some of the details of the man in question’s testimony because it was “unfit for publication”. …

Ah, it’s 62 years to the day since Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary that Charles de Gaulle’s blood was being stored in his fridge. It wasn’t his main fridge in the house, because — according to Peter Hennessy’s Winds of Change — that one was ‘full of haddock and…