ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE FEBRUARY 23, 1987
ANDY WARHOL has just died at the age of 58. As the creator and salesman of what is called Pop Art, Warhol is most famous, to those who have never heard of pop art, for the statement: ‘In the future everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.’
FEBRUARY 23, 2006
AN ARMED gang stole £40million in Britain’s biggest-ever cash robbery. They abducted the wife and young son of a security depot manager to force him to co-operate. Wearing balaclavas and holding pistols, six gangsters walked into his depot in Kent and emptied the vaults into a truck.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
EMILY BLUNT, 38. The London-born star of The devil Wears Prada and The Girl on The Train played the title role in 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns. Blunt, whose very first professional acting job was in a play with dame Judi dench, used to date singer Michael Bublé (he wrote the song Everything for her).
FRANCESCA SIMON, 66. The Americanborn, British-based author wrote the Horrid Henry series of children’s books, which have been turned into an ITV series and a 2011 movie starring Anjelica Huston. Simon was such a bookworm as a child that she would come down to breakfast with her nose blue from the ink on the pages.
BORN ON THIS DAY
CÉSAR RITZ (1850-1918). The Swiss hotelier was dismissed from his job as a wine waiter after a year — and told he was an unsuitable candidate for the hotel trade. He went on to manage London’s Savoy and founded the Paris and London hotels that bore his name. The Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII was a loyal guest and was reported to have said: ‘Where Ritz goes, I go.’
VICTOR FLEMING (18891949). The oscar-winning American filmmaker directed two classics released in 1939 — The Wizard of oz and Gone With The Wind. He was born in a tent in California and into a childhood of poverty. The former mechanic and chauffeur was President Woodrow Wilson’s personal cameraman at the post World War I Paris peace conference.
ON FEBRUARY 23…
IN 1950, the BBC reported the General Election results on television for the first time, in a programme presented by Richard dimbleby. IN 1963, police investigated whether a Sussex farmer, Peter Hicks, had broken the law by electrifying his Land Rover to deter traffic wardens.
WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION: salmi (c 1750s)
A) the long tail of a graduate’s hood B) a ragout of partially roasted game stewed in a rich sauce C) a crushed velvet hat (Answer below)
PHRASE EXPLAINED: make up leeway — meaning to compensate for time that has been wasted; this 19th century phrase alludes to the ‘leeway’ lost by a sailing vessel being too far downwind to make its intended course. Lost leeway has to be made up, with difficulty.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
the trouble with having an open mind is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it Sir Terry Pratchett, fantasy novelist (1948-2015)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT do you call a lizard lost in a snowstorm? A blizzard.
Guess the Definition answer: B