1989 Václav Havel, writer, dissident and former political prisoner, became president of Czechoslovakia, the first non-communist president for 41 years. 1739 A violent easterly storm introduced the ‘Great Frost’, prelude to the first major famine in modern Irish history. Unlike the Great Famine (1845–9), which mainly affected people dependent on the potato, the eighteenth-century event ... Read more
