2347BC: As the sun shone, Noah's Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, after 150 days of consecutive rain. Noah was then said to be aged 600.

1477: William Caxton issued the first dated, printed book from his printing press in Westminster - it was Dictes or Sayengis of The Philosophres.

1626: St Peter's in Rome was consecrated.

1910: There were more than 100 arrests when suffragettes tried to storm the House of Commons.

1916: The first battle of the Somme ended.

1926: George Bernard Shaw, pictured, refused to accept the Nobel Prize money of £7,000 awarded to him a year earlier. He said: "I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."

1928: The first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, was shown.

1933: BBC Radio's In Town Tonight was first broadcast.

1987: The worst fire in the history of the London Underground killed 31 people at King's Cross.

1991: Beirut hostage Terry Waite and American Thomas Sutherland were released by their pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad captors.

On this day last year: Tony Blair's envoy Stephen Evans arrived in Kabul for talks with the Northern Alliance amid reports that the deployment of British troops to Afghanistan had been delayed.

BIRTHDAYS: David Hemmings, actor/director, 61; Linda Evans, actress, 60; Graham Parker, rock singer, 52; Elizabeth Perkins, actress, 42; Kim Wilde, singer, 42; Gavin Peacock, footballer, 35.