100 years ago

All interested in athletics had watched very closely the progress of the competitors during the previous week at Stockholm in what could be described as the preliminary section of the Olympic Games.

The opening of the Stadium in State by the King of Sweden, and its dedication to the service of sport, marked the beginning in real earnest of the struggle for supremacy between the representatives of the nations assembled in the Swedish capital.

Currently Sweden and the United States led the way, each claiming seven wins, followed by the British Empire with six, and France with five.

All round it was clear that in almost every branch of sport our Continental and American rivals had proved very apt pupils; there was scarcely a game or pastime in which they had not emulated the British athlete, and so strenuous was their devotion to athleticism that the degree of superiority in favour of any one country was not by any means so marked as it had been five or ten years before.

50 years ago

The Department at the British Museum, which repaired and restored books and manuscripts, handled some unusual jobs. One of the oddest of all had come from the Minster Library at York. The Museum was asked to repair a St Mary's Abbey cartulary and at the same time to preserve - a hole.

Legend had it that the cartulary (a collection of charters recording the rights and privileges of the Abbey) was damaged by a cannon ball in the Siege of York.

It was kept in St Mary's Tower, which was blown up by the Parliamentary forces, and it seemed likely that the cartulary was burned in the explosion or clipped by a piece of stone or metal.

There were semi-circular pieces missing from the edges of many pages in the middle of the book. Fortunately, the writer left big margins and not a lot of the writing had been lost.

At the British Museum, the 600-year-old parchment pages were softened and flattened and the edges of the hole, which had burn marks, were strengthened.

25 years ago

Government plans to allow schools to opt out of local-authority control were attacked in a paper by the York-based Centre for the Study of Comprehensive Schools.

Taking schools away from local authorities and handing them over to independent trusts would lead to less parental choice, not more, claimed Mr Gabriel Chanan, an educational and community researcher.

Middle-class parents would be most likely to exploit changes while poorer parents would get no choice.

Mr Chanan argued in his 15-page paper, Everyone's Schools, that allowing schools to opt out and becoming self-governing would lead to their introducing highly-selective admissions procedures and a mushrooming of entrance exams.