FAMILY AFFAIRS

Chris Maume looks back on events from this week in history

27 APRIL 1667

Having gone blind in 1652, John Milton had dictated most of Paradise Lost to friends or amanuenses (while suffering from gout, and grieving for his second wife, Katherine, and their daughter). It was published in 1664 but on 27 April 1667 Milton, impoverished, sold the copyright to the publisher Samuel Simmons for £5, equivalent to around £7,500 today, with a further £5 at the end of each print run of 1,300-1,500 copies. The first print run sold out in 18 months. Just before his death, in 1674, Milton supervised a second edition, accompanied by an explanation of "why the poem rhymes not".

29 APRIL 1980

Alfred Hitchcock's last feature film, Family Plot, had come out in 1976. He subsequently worked on a script for a spy thriller to be called "The Short Night", partly based on the real double agent George Blake, who escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966. Some work was done, but on 29 April 1980 Hitchcock (above) died of renal failure at home in Bel Air. The script was eventually published in the book The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock by David Freeman, one of its co-writers.

30 APRIL 1900

Jonathan Luther "Casey" Jones was a locomotive engineer on the Illinois Central Railroad. On 30 April 1900 his train, Cannonball Express, collided with another near Vaughan, Mississippi. He was killed, but by staying on the train and slowing it down he was thought to have saved the lives of all his passengers. His legend quickly grew: "The Ballad of Casey Jones" would be recorded by Mississippi John Hurt, Pete Seeger, the Grateful Dead and Johnny Cash, while Kris Kristofferson, AC/DC and Motörhead also took up the theme.