ON THIS DAY
JULY 21, 1944
HiTLER came on the air at one o’clock this morning to announce the sensational news that revolt had broken out in Germany and a group of army officers were responsible for the attempt to assassinate him at his headquarters yesterday. Himmler, he said, has been given the task of quelling and ‘ruthlessly exterminating the usurpers’. ‘i order that no military authority, no leader of any unit, no soldier in the field is to obey any order emanating from these usurpers,’ said the Fuhrer.
JULY 21, 1990
THE iRA’s latest soft target was the Stock Exchange yesterday. But the bomb that blasted the building failed to cripple the heart of the nation’s financial dealings. The only damage was to the rear of the building. No one was hurt. it caused barely a ripple in the billions being traded on the world’s markets.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
RoSS KEMp, 56. The Essexborn actor and TV presenter ( pictured) found fame on EastEnders as Grant Mitchell. The son of a hairdresser and a Scotland Yard detective now makes documentaries about some of the most dangerous places on earth and has catalogued his adventures in a memoir called A-Z of Hell. He said: ‘What affects me most are children in these desperate situations, because they are innocents in all this.’ JUNo TEMpLE, 31. The actress from London was the green fairy Thistletwit opposite Angelina Jolie in Maleficent. She started acting at eight and won a Bafta Rising Star award in 2013. Her aunt, Nina Temple, was the last secretary of the British Communist party.
BORN ON THIS DAY
pAUL REUTER (1816-1899). The Germanborn founder of one of the first news agencies was a pioneer of telegraphy. Before moving to London, the former bank clerk had met mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was experimenting with the electric telegraph, which eventually replaced the carrier pigeon. He was portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in the Warner Bros film A Dispatch From Reuters (1941. SiR JoNATHAN MiLLER (1934-2019). The Londonborn polymath (pictured) qualified as a doctor but soon quit for comedy after experiencing ‘a cocaine-like snort of celebrity and approval’ at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. His tough decision was summed up by biographer Kate Bassett: ‘He could not both walk the wards and tread the boards.’ ON JULY 21…
IN 1796, Scottish poet Robert Burns died, aged 37.
IN 1946, Britain introduced bread rationing that would last for two years. WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE CORRECT DEFINITION: Echinus (c mid 14th century)
A) A blinding headache B) An ear of corn C) A sea urchin Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED — Off one’s own bat: meaning to do something of one’s own accord; a metaphor from cricket, it first appears in print in 1742 with Henry Thomas Waghorn, the cricket historian and statistician, in reference to runs scored by the batsman as opposed to extras.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter de Vries, U.S. novelist (1910-1993)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY is it hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs? Because they always take things literally.
Guess The Definition answer: C