Alice Pemberton: In two thousand five, Tropical Storm Alpha forms in the Atlantic, the first storm named from the Greek alphabet after the season exhausts its usual list. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen thirty-four, federal agents kill Pretty Boy Floyd near East Liverpool, Ohio, ending the bank robber’s years as a Depression-era outlaw. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen eighty-one, the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertifies the striking air traffic controllers' union, PATCO. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the twenty-second of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on an emperor who moved into a building site; Arthur Nightingale on a painter who died watching a door; Judge Marion Calloway on a prize its winner was never free to refuse; and Doc Sullivan on a man who cut his own rope above Paris. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: In seven ninety-four, an emperor of Japan abandoned a capital he'd built only a decade before, and the city he moved to still stands. Our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Still stands, and you know it as Kyoto. Emperor Kanmu had already left Nara for Nagaoka; now he left Nagaoka for a village called Uda, and he did it in a hurry. He tore down the old reception hall to reuse the timber, so that New Year no ceremony was held at all. Alice Pemberton: A court without its New Year rites. How great was the rush? Professor Edmund Cavendish: The markets went first, with shops built and merchants moved before the court arrived. Kanmu processed into Heian-kyō by carriage, and his audience hall wasn't finished for more than a year. Thousands of workmen were still being summoned from the provinces three years on. Alice Pemberton: So he moved into a building site. Why did this one stick? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Because Kanmu's reign was the summit of imperial power. And that's the irony. That same year he gave a frontier general a new title, 'Barbarian-subduing Great General.' Shōgun. In later centuries the men holding it would be Japan's real military rulers, and Kanmu's own descendants, the Taira, became some of its most prominent warriors. He built his city at the peak of an emperor's power and, in the same year, wrote the job title of the men who would take that power away. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen-oh-six, an old painter was caught in a storm on his favourite mountain and carried home in a laundry cart. Our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: A laundry cart, because that's what the passing driver had when he found Paul Cézanne collapsed on the road. He'd stayed out for hours in the Sainte-Victoire hills, painting as the storm broke over him. And the next morning, which tells you the whole man, he went to his studio to add one more touch to a portrait of his gardener, Vallier. Alice Pemberton: Where does stubbornness like that come from? Arthur Nightingale: From Aix, and from money. His father was a banker, which spared Cézanne the poverty that ground down other painters. What money couldn't buy was respect. For decades the critics laughed, and his buyers were fellow artists like Pissarro and a dealer called Ambroise Vollard, who finally gave him a solo show when Cézanne was in his fifties. Alice Pemberton: And the laughter stopped? Arthur Nightingale: It turned to worship. Matisse and Picasso are both said to have called Cézanne 'the father of us all.' But after that storm, he tried to paint a peasant in his garden, fainted halfway through the sitting, and never rose again. He wouldn't even let the doctor touch him. Alice Pemberton: Who was with him at the end? Arthur Nightingale: His housekeeper, Madame Brémond. She telegraphed his son, another Paul, in Paris: 'Come at once, both of you. Father very ill.' Cézanne took the last sacraments with his eyes on the door, and she remembered what he said. 'Paul isn't here yet! He won't come!' He was right. The father of us all died waiting for his own son. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen sixty-four, the Swedish Academy gave its literature prize to a man who had already written to say no. Our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway. Marion? Judge Marion Calloway: He said no in writing, and too late. Jean-Paul Sartre read in a Paris paper that the Academy was leaning his way, and he wrote that he could not and would not accept the distinction, 'neither in nineteen sixty-four, nor later.' His letter arrived after the committee had chosen him. The reply was the whole case: the decision had already been made. Alice Pemberton: Why refuse it at all? Judge Marion Calloway: It was his standing rule. Sartre declined every official honour, and he gave the reason in one line: 'a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.' The prize money went back to the Nobel Foundation. Alice Pemberton: So did he win or didn't he? Judge Marion Calloway: In law, he won. The Academy announced that 'the presentation of the prize cannot take place,' and in the same breath affirmed that the award was valid. There was no ceremony that December, but the citation stands, praising work 'filled with the spirit of freedom.' So Sartre, the philosopher who taught that we are what we choose, is a Nobel laureate forever, by a verdict he was never free to refuse. Alice Pemberton: In seventeen ninety-seven, a man above Paris cut the only rope holding him to his balloon. He did it on purpose. Our man for science and medicine, Doc Sullivan. Doc? Doc Sullivan: On purpose, and about a kilometre up. André-Jacques Garnerin rose from the Parc Monceau under a hydrogen balloon, with a canvas parachute folded shut above his basket like a closed umbrella on a pole. Then he severed the line. The balloon burst, the umbrella opened, and Garnerin fell. Alice Pemberton: Did the physics hold? Doc Sullivan: Mostly. The canopy caught the air and slowed him, but it had no vent at the crown, so the trapped air could only escape out the sides, and the basket swung like a pendulum. Alice Pemberton: Who was watching? Doc Sullivan: The astronomer Jérôme Lalande, who wrote that 'a gloomy silence reigned in the assembly.' Then the swinging began: 'a cry of terror escaped the spectators, and sensitive women fainted.' Alice Pemberton: And Garnerin? Doc Sullivan: Bumped, scraped and entirely unhurt. Lalande records what Garnerin did next: he 'mounted a horse on the spot' and rode back to the park through an immense crowd. The first man to fall safely from the sky went straight back for his applause. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen-oh-seven, a New York bank ran dry before lunch. At the table: our markets correspondent Gwen Harmon, book editor and essayist Calvin Alden, and our diplomacy hand, former ambassador Eleanor Shaw. Gwen? Gwen Harmon: Dry by noon. It was the Knickerbocker Trust Company, and its president, Charles Barney, was tied to a failed bid to corner copper. Depositors pulled out nearly eight million dollars in a single morning, and the doors shut. That was the start of the Panic of nineteen-oh-seven. A bank run is a rumour that comes true because people believe it. Eleanor Shaw: Diplomats live on the same currency, Gwen. In eighteen eighty-four, delegates from about two dozen nations met in Washington, and on this day they signed the act making Greenwich the world's prime meridian. American railways had been running on more than a hundred local times. Now every clock on Earth counts from a line in a London park. Calvin Alden: And it took an American president to summon the world to agree on a British line. Mine is softer. In nineteen sixty-four, Jonathan Cape published the first volume of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang by Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond. Fleming had died two months earlier. He wrote it in pencil in a Hove hotel, as bedtime stories for his son Caspar, because his doctors had banned the typewriter after a heart attack. Gwen Harmon: Ten and six a volume. Bond would have demanded a better rate. Calvin Alden: Here's what stays with me. Fleming died on Caspar's twelfth birthday, and the one book he wrote by hand, for his boy, came out after he'd gone. Alice Pemberton: Eleanor, a vote in eighteen sixty-six. Eleanor Shaw: Veneto and Mantua voting to join the Kingdom of Italy. Austria had handed the region to a French general in a Venice hotel room, and he passed it straight on to the Italians. The first count showed over six hundred and forty thousand yes. And sixty-nine no. Calvin Alden: Sixty-nine. I'd publish their letters. Gwen Harmon: I'd want to know where they banked. Calvin Alden: Last, the far horizon. In nineteen seventy-five, the Soviet lander Venera 9 touched down on Venus. It survived fifty-three minutes and sent back the first picture ever taken from the surface of another planet: a boulder-strewn slope under a bright, sunless sky. A lens cap jammed on one camera, so we only got half the view. It was still more than anyone had ever seen. Alice Pemberton: A run on a bank, a line through a park, a magical car, sixty-nine stubborn ballots and a stony slope on Venus. Belief moves more than we think. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the twenty-second of October — where in nineteen forty-seven the first Kashmir war began as Pakistani forces invaded Kashmir; where in nineteen ten Hawley Harvey Crippen was convicted of poisoning his wife, the first felon ever caught with the help of radio; and, more recently, where in nineteen ninety-nine Maurice Papon, an official of the Vichy government, was jailed for crimes against humanity. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: They skipped the oldest story of the day. On this day in two thousand one hundred and thirty-seven BC, by one astronomer's reckoning, an eclipse darkened the sky over China, and the Book of Documents blames the court astronomers Hsi and Ho, who were 'sunk and lost in wine.' Mortimer Finch: Drunk through an eclipse? It's the sun, Humphrey. It's quite large. Humphrey Thwaite: Blind musicians beat drums, and a prince was sent to punish the pair. Mind you, scholars still argue about the date. Mortimer Finch: So the astronomers were drunk and the historians can't agree. Some traditions are eternal. Humphrey Thwaite: Pour me one, Mortimer.