Flavour of the month: September – Beyoncé, Gaddafi and Dr. Seuss

This month’s dose of trivia and anecdote sees a Yorkshireman insulting an England cricketer, the young Beyoncé training her voice in an unusual way, and Keith Floyd taking revenge on a table of diners who’d made one of his waitresses cry…

• 1 September 1969 – Muammar Gaddafi seizes power in Libya. He subsequently abolished all military ranks above his own one of Colonel, because he was fearful of people launching a coup against him.
• 2 September 1666 – The Great Fire of London breaks out. It famously started in a baker’s shop on Pudding Lane, which might lead you to assume that the lane was named after the shop. Not so: the lane, which slopes sharply down towards the Thames, was in effect an open sewer, and the ‘puddings’ were… well, let’s just say they’d emerged from people’s bodies.