Mathew Lyons

The great native historian of Africa was baptised by Pope Leo X on 6 January 1520.

A recital took place at the church of St Nicholas in Oberndorf in Salzburg, on the evening of 24 December 1818.

Anna Komnene, author of Alexiad, was born on 1 December 1083.

The publishers of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness were prosecuted for obscenity on 9 November 1928.

Olympe de Gouges was executed for sedition on the order of the Revolutionary Tribunal on 3 November 1793.

Ashburnham House, which held a manuscript collection gifted to the nation in 1701, went up in flames on 23 October 1731.

Nat Turner, leader of one of the most significant rebellions in the antebellum South, was born on 2 October 1800.

Hildegard of Bingen died on 17 September 1179.

Svengali appeared as a character in Trilby, released as a book in the US on 8 September 1894.

Holbein’s creative life during three decades of extraordinary political, religious and intellectual turbulence.