Alice Pemberton: In eighteen sixty-four, Denmark signs the Treaty of Vienna, surrendering Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg to Prussia and Austria. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen sixty-five, the English model Jean Shrimpton arrives at Derby Day at Melbourne's Flemington Racecourse in a controversially short minidress, and the miniskirt lands. Alice Pemberton: And in nineteen eighty-five, Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off on its last successful mission. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the thirtieth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on the temporary deal that still runs world trade; Arthur Nightingale on a book hunter loose in the monastery libraries; Judge Marion Calloway puts a Martian invasion on trial; Margaux Delacroix on a city built out of grief; and Doc Sullivan, James Harlow and Birdie Maddox at the table. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen forty-seven, diplomats in Geneva signed a stopgap that world trade still runs on. For the front page — our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Still runs on, near enough word for word: the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, remains in force inside the World Trade Organization. It was signed in the Council Chamber of the Palais des Nations by twenty-three countries. And look at the list: Burma, Ceylon, Lebanon, Syria, Cuba, Chile, Southern Rhodesia, sitting beside Britain and America. Alice Pemberton: And GATT was never meant to be the main event? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Never. The grand design was an International Trade Organization, standing beside the World Bank and the IMF. Then the United States walked away, the cathedral collapsed, and only the scaffolding was left. GATT was applied on a provisional basis, and it ran world trade for nearly half a century. Alice Pemberton: What did the scaffolding promise? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Its preamble says it plainly: the 'substantial reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers and the elimination of preferences, on a reciprocal and mutually advantageous basis.' Among the major players, average tariffs ran around twenty-two percent at the signing. By the end of the century they were five. The most durable building in the post-war order was the one marked temporary. Alice Pemberton: Poggio Bracciolini spent his life pulling the lost classics of Rome out of monastery libraries where they were quietly decaying. For the biographical sketch — our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: Quietly decaying, and forgotten, in German, Swiss and French cloisters — until a Florentine with beautiful handwriting came looking. Poggio Bracciolini was a village boy from near Arezzo, taught Latin by a protégé of Petrarch, and so deft a copyist that Florence's leading scholars took him up. He was a sworn notary at twenty-one. Alice Pemberton: And then Rome? Arthur Nightingale: The papal chancery. Poggio wrote letters for popes, rose to papal secretary, and served seven of them across half a century — one of them an antipope. He never took holy orders and never got rich; he stayed a layman on a meagre salary. And between the councils and the rival popes, he went hunting. Alice Pemberton: What did the hunt bring home? Arthur Nightingale: Lost speeches of Cicero. Quintilian on oratory. Vitruvius on architecture. And De rerum natura — On the Nature of Things — the only surviving work of the poet Lucretius. All of it copied out in a book hand his contemporaries called extraordinarily elegant. Alice Pemberton: And the ending? Arthur Nightingale: Home, to Florence. Cosimo de' Medici made Poggio chancellor of the Republic in his seventies. His wife, Vaggia, married to him when she was about eighteen, died early in his final year. Poggio Bracciolini followed her on this day in fourteen fifty-nine, his history of Florence unfinished. The man who rescued Rome's lost books left his own incomplete. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen thirty-eight, America's newspapers accused a radio play of convincing the nation that Martians had landed in New Jersey. From the archive — our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway, to weigh the charge. Marion? Judge Marion Calloway: Weigh it I will, because most of the charge sheet was written by newspapers. The facts: a Sunday night on the Columbia Broadcasting System, the Halloween episode of the Mercury Theatre on the Air. Orson Welles directed and narrated The War of the Worlds, from H. G. Wells's novel, in a script by Howard Koch. Alice Pemberton: So where's the trick? Judge Marion Calloway: In the costume. The War of the Worlds was dressed as a dance programme — Ramón Raquello and his orchestra at the Park Plaza Hotel — interrupted by bulletins: explosions on Mars, then a cylinder down near Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Alice Pemberton: Did anyone warn the audience? Judge Marion Calloway: The very first line, which I'd read straight into the record: 'The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.' Alice Pemberton: And the famous panic? Judge Marion Calloway: Historians have since called much of it a myth — and consider who brought the case: the newspapers, against their newest rival. My verdict: the broadcast told a fiction and announced it. The papers told one and called it news. Alice Pemberton: Emperors build monuments to themselves; Hadrian built an entire city on the Nile for a young man who died on its banks. For the gallery — our arts and culture critic, Margaux Delacroix. Margaux? Margaux Delacroix: A whole city as an act of mourning — Antinoöpolis, founded on this day in the year one hundred and thirty, the most extravagant artwork Rome ever commissioned. Antinous was a Bithynian, the emperor's favourite, and he died on Hadrian's journey through Egypt. The historian Cassius Dio says Hadrian honoured him 'by building a city on the spot where he had suffered this fate and naming it after him.' Alice Pemberton: Suffered what fate? Margaux Delacroix: That's the gap at the centre of the canvas. Dio says Antinous died 'either by falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or, as the truth is, by being offered in sacrifice.' An accident, says the grieving emperor. A ritual, says the historian. Alice Pemberton: And the art itself? Margaux Delacroix: Everywhere — Dio says Hadrian set up his images 'practically all over the world.' The Antinous Mondragone was carved that same year; another Antinous, from Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, now stands in Rome's Gregorian Egyptian Museum. Hadrian even declared he had seen a new star and took it for Antinous. We have the face, the city, the star — and still not the one fact that matters: how he died. Alice Pemberton: Five echoes and three voices: our science and medicine man Doc Sullivan, our world-affairs correspondent James Harlow, and our Southern firecracker Birdie Maddox. James — a bridge. James Harlow: In nineteen seventy-three, the Bosphorus Bridge opened in Istanbul, joining Europe to Asia — the first span since the Persian king Darius threw a pontoon bridge across. And the toll? Exactly the ferry fare it replaced. Birdie Maddox: Same price as the ferry? Sugar, that's not engineering, that's manners. And folks on foot crossed free. Doc Sullivan: Mine's a crossing too. In nineteen sixty, at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, Michael Woodruff's team moved a kidney from Martin Abbot into his identical twin, Lewis — Britain's first successful kidney transplant. Birdie Maddox: And the brother who gave it? Doc Sullivan: Back at work within three weeks. The registrar, B. Nolan, remembered his part plainly: 'I carried the kidney across to Sir Michael, and then I assisted him.' Birdie Maddox: Lord. Mine's the dark mirror. In eighteen fifty-eight, a Bradford sweet-maker meant to bulk his peppermints with cheap plaster called daft — and a druggist's new assistant fetched arsenic from the wrong cask. 'Humbug Billy' sold them off his market stall, and about twenty people died. James Harlow: Two unmarked casks of white powder, side by side. An accident waiting with its coat on. James Harlow: Empires end in paperwork too. In nineteen eighteen, the Croatian and Hungarian parliaments dissolved the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen, and Zagreb's Sabor voted unanimously to cut every tie with Hungary and Austria. Birdie Maddox: Unanimous? My family can't agree on pie. And one from closer to home I can't laugh at. In eighteen thirty-one, Nat Turner — an enslaved preacher his people called 'The Prophet' — was arrested in Virginia for leading the bloodiest slave rebellion in American history. His band killed fifty-five white people. As many as a hundred and twenty Black people, most of them uninvolved, were killed in revenge. Doc Sullivan: And his own voice survives through a white lawyer's pamphlet — The Confessions of Nat Turner, taken down by Thomas Gray in his cell. James Harlow: So the one man everybody wanted to hear from reaches us in somebody else's handwriting. Alice Pemberton: A bridge, a kidney, a crown and a confession — every one of them something carried across. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the thirtieth of October — where in eighteen-oh-six the German garrison at Stettin, convinced it was outnumbered, surrendered to a far smaller French force without firing a shot; where in nineteen forty-one the Nazis sent the Jews of Pidhaytsi, a whole town's community, to the extermination camp at Bełżec; and, more recently, where in two thousand and two a dying Warren Zevon used his last public appearance, on David Letterman's show, to tell us all to 'enjoy every sandwich'. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: They skipped Ryswick. Sixteen ninety-seven: France and the Holy Roman Empire sign the treaty that finishes off the Nine Years' War. Mortimer Finch: Nine years. Who won? Humphrey Thwaite: Broadly? Everyone went home to the borders they'd agreed at Nijmegen before the war began. Mortimer Finch: Nine years of slaughter to arrive exactly where you started. Humphrey Thwaite: Ah, but they promised 'a Christian, Universal, Perpetual Peace.' Mortimer Finch: Perpetual. In Europe. I'll get my coat.