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...being split along royalist and republican lines in the Dutch East Indies on hearing news of the execution of King Louis XVI. Girardin died of dysentery in the Dutch transport Dordrecht in December 1794. The ship's surgeon then revealed her true gender. She was honoured in 2005 as the first female European visitor to set foot on the island. Learn more about French history...

...nuns, and nobility, which reflect her single-mindedness, independent spirit, and refusal to be intimidated by power or authority. Hildegard travelled throughout southern Germany and into Switzerland and as far as Paris, preaching and evangelising. She died on 17 September 1179. She was formally canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI. Learn more about women in religion...

...her from influencing policy related to women at home. Kollontai saw marriage and the traditional family as legacies of the past. She believed that, under communism, these would give way to stronger ties between the individual and wider society. Alexandra Kollontai died in Moscow in 1952, less than a month away from her 80th birthday. Learn about Marxism and history...

...learn, for example, are often real Latin words – such as accio, ‘I summon’ – or blends of Latin words, or Latin with other languages: expelliarmus, the disarming charm, sounds like real Latin, but is a mixture of expello, ‘I drive out’, and arma, ‘weapons’, while the light charm lumos is an adaptation of the Latin lumen, ‘light’. Rowling also drew...