ON THIS DAY
August 17, 2017
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE AUGUST 17, 1949
GONE With The Wind author Margaret Mitchell died in hospital yesterday, age 48, after being struck by a car last Thursday night near her home in Atlanta, Georgia. She was on her way to the cinema with her husband when an off-duty taxi driver raced down Peachtree Street — where her heroine Scarlett O’Hara had many adventures — and knocked her unconscious.
AUGUST 17, 1968
FILM star Sophia Loren (pictured), who has lost two babies, is taking no risks. Her baby is due in January and until then she is hiding from the world. She rests in bed for 20 hours a day, in a luxury, sound-proof apartment in Geneva’s Intercontintental Hotel. [ Her son, now conductor Carlo Ponti Jr, was born in December 1968.]
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
SEAN PENN, 57. The American actor and double Oscar winner is the ex-husband of Madonna and House Of Cards star Robin Wright. He has had angry run-ins with photographers over the years and has been quoted as saying of them: ‘They should be put in a cage where you can poke them with a stick for a quarter. But not in a hostile way, just for giggles.’ SIR VIDIADHAR (V. S.) NAIPAUL, 85. The Nobel and Booker prize-winning British novelist and travel writer, born in Trinidad, is known for acerbity. He compared Tony Blair with a pirate whose ‘ socialist revolution’ had imposed a ‘ plebeian culture’, described the fatwa against rival Salman Rushdie as ‘an extreme form of literary criticism’, and said Charles Dickens ‘died from self-parody’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
HAZEL BISHOP (1906-1998). The U.S. chemist and entrepreneur invented the first long-lasting lipstick in the Forties. Marketed as ‘kiss-proof’, its slogan was: ‘Stays on you . . . not on him.’ TED HUGHES (1930-1998). The Yorkshire- born Poet Laureate ( pictured), was married to American poet Sylvia Plath until she took her own life in 1963. Some Plath fans shouted ‘ murderer!’ at his poetry readings. Five years after her death, Hughes was seeing three women whom he referred to as A, B and C, outlining his dilemma in a poem: ‘Which bed? Which bride? Which breast’s comfort.’
ON AUGUST 17…
IN 1987, Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s former deputy, killed himself in Spandau Prison in what was West Berlin, aged 93. In 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton admitted to a relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION Surbater (coined 1633) A) Leather pouch worn with a kilt. B) Large pannier that shapes a dress. C) Person who tires out others by walking. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Come to the end of one’s tether: Meaning to be at the end of one’s patience. Alludes to a tethered animal which can graze only as far as the rope allows.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
If ever I feel like exercise, I go into a darkened room and lie down until the mood passes. Tony Benn, British politician (1925-2014)
JOKE OF THE DAY
BAKERS are protective of recipes. They just reveal them on a knead-to-know basis. Guess The Definition answer: C.