ON THIS DAY
November 8, 2019
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
NOVEMBER 8, 1944
In future, the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons, with its tradition of a grille behind which women peered, themselves unseen, at the Members, will be abolished. Women will sit on a par with men in the public galleries, as they do in the House itself.
NOVEMBER 8, 2000
IT would have been the world’s biggest robbery. The gang who crashed the Millennium Dome on a hijacked JCB yesterday planned to get away with £350 million in diamonds. But it all ended in farce as more than 100 policemen were lying in wait for the would-be millionaires.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
RICHARD CURTIS, 63. The new Zealand-born writer of Love Actually and notting Hill had planned for his breakout film to be called four Weddings And A Honeymoon. It was a friend, Helen fielding (of Bridget Jones’s Diary), who insisted the script needed a funeral. This may be Curtis’s last year of work; the co-founder of Comic Relief has said: ‘I’m retiring on my birthday in 2020.’ GORDON RAMSAY, 53. The celebrity chef from Renfrewshire once threw Joan Collins out of his restaurant when she was dining with food critic A.A. Gill, who had called Ramsay ‘a wonderful chef, just a really second-rate human being’. He has been a massive exporter of British cuisine — in one year, his Las Vegas restaurant sold 129,554 beef wellingtons and 135,000 sticky toffee puddings.
BORN ON THIS DAY
ABRAHAM ‘BRAM’ STOKER (1847-1912). The Dublin-born author of Dracula grew up in the same row of houses as Oscar Wilde and married Wilde’s first girlfriend. The former civil servant scribbled notes for his most famous novel inside books at the London Library — which were only discovered earlier this year. MARGARET MITCHELL (1900-1949). The American journalist wrote Gone With The Wind out of boredom while nursing an injured ankle. She called its heroine Pansy, but the publisher asked to change it to Scarlett O’Hara. The book won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 1939 blockbuster film version, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, scooped a then record-breaking ten Academy Awards.
ON NOVEMBER 8…
IN 1999, Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli released Sacred Arias, which would become the biggest- selling solo album in classical music history.
IN 2016, Adele was named the richest British celebrity under 30 by Heat magazine after more than doubling her fortune to an estimated £92 million.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: hepatic (late 14th c) A) Relating to the liver. B) Quarrelsome. C) Apathetic. (Answer below)
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Harbinger of doom: meaning a bad omen, a sign of something bad to happen; a ‘harbinger’ in the 1200s meant someone who went ahead of an army to scout and bring back news; later, it came to mean someone who announces the arrival of another.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
J.K. Rowling, British author
JOKE OF THE DAY
HOW do mountains stay warm in winter? snowcaps. Guess the Definition answer: a