ON THIS DAY

FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE

JANUARY 18, 1944 THE singing of The Horst Wessel Song, the Nazi Party’s hymn, has been forbidden by the German authorities, unless special permission is obtained. The reason? Too many parodies are being written.

JANUARY 18, 1967 Mr HAROLD WILSON spoke as ‘a good European’ in rome today, determined to prove to France’s President de Gaulle that Britain is not tied to America’s apron strings. The Prime Minister will make a speech in Strasbourg setting out the aspirations of the British government for a wider European unit for generations to come.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

JANE HOrrOCkS, 54. The Lancashire-born actress, right, who played Bubble in BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, once dated the late rock star Ian Dury and film director Sam Mendes. Horrocks calls her house ‘Tesco Towers’, as it was paid for by the supermarket ads in which she played Prunella Scales’s daughter. But she has said she doesn’t enjoy shopping there because it’s full of ‘chavs’. JOHN BOOrMAN, 85. The English director, a former dry cleaner, has said health and safety would stop him making his most famous film, Deliverance, today. It follows four friends on a disastrous canoe trip into the wilderness. ‘You’d have to have a riskassessment officer on hand at all times,’ Boorman said. ‘All we had was a diver. And he did have to go into the river and pull people out. One day Ned Beatty went down and he didn’t come up. I always had the fear I was going to lose one of the cast.’

BORN ON THIS DAY

CARY GRANT (1904-1986). The Bristol-born star, right, who began his career as an acrobat, made 72 films including North By Northwest and Charade. Christened Archibald Leach, he called himself Cary as it was the name of a character he had played, and Grant from a list provided by his studio. Married and divorced four times, he based his acting on the persona of Noel Coward, saying: ‘I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person.’

JACOB BRONOWSKI (1908-1974). The Polish-born British mathematician and historian came to fame with his landmark 1973 BBC documentary series The Ascent Of Man. He was labelled a ‘security risk’ by MI5 for nearly 20 years, partly owing to anonymous colleagues who considered him ‘an agitator of the Communist type’.

ON JANUARY 18 . . .

IN 1936, Nobel prize-winning English writer rudyard kipling died aged 70.

IN 1993, Martin Luther king Jr Day — the third Monday of January — was observed in all 50 U.S. states for the first time.

WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION: Magnanerie (1887)

A) Good will. B) The art of rearing silkworms. C) Duel to the death. Answer below

PHRASE EXPLAINED To talk turkey:

To talk purposefully about profitable matters; the origin is obscure but may derive from the gobble-gobble noise made by turkeys, resembling the chatter between two people talking money.

QUOTE FOR TODAY

I’VE seen George Foreman shadow boxing and the shadow won. Muhammad Ali, U.S. boxer (1942-2016)

JOKE OF THE DAY

WHY did Stalin only write in lower case? Because he hated capitalism. Guess The Definition answer: B.