history

Born to a rabbinical Jewish family in what is now Ukraine, Leopold Weiss converted to Islam, became a confidant of Ibn Saud, and ended up as one of the intellectual architects of Pakistan. The life is almost too improbable to believe. It is all true.

On 10 March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke six words into a device above a Boston theatre and Thomas Watson heard them from another room. The telephone had just worked for the first time.

On 9 March 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations — not the final word on economics, but the first coherent one. The discipline has been arguing with it ever since.

On 8 March 1963, a handful of young Ba'athist officers seized Damascus in a coup so bloodless and unremarkable that the population greeted it with indifference. Nobody noticed. That was the problem.

Britain forced China to buy opium at gunpoint. Now China is the primary source of the chemicals that make fentanyl, which kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. The symmetry is not accidental, but it is not justice either.

In 1826, a 30-year-old diplomat abducted a 15-year-old heiress with forged letters and a manufactured family crisis, married her at Gretna Green, and nearly got away with it. He served three years in prison. Then helped found New Zealand.

On 6 March 1475, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born in a small hill town in Tuscany. He went on to produce some of the most reproduced images in the history of Western civilisation, and died still working, at 88.

On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died on the floor of his dacha, where he had lain unattended for the better part of a day. Nobody had dared go in to check.

In the centre of Moscow, just east of the Kremlin, there is a district whose name translates as China City. It has never had anything to do with China.

On 4 March 1918, an Army cook reported sick at Camp Funston, Kansas. By noon, a hundred soldiers had the same symptoms. Within two years, the Spanish flu would kill more people than the war that spread it.