Calm Bedtime History

At Hogwarts, on a summer evening in 1995, four young champions entered a maze grown across the Quidditch pitch. At its centre stood the Triwizard Cup, the prize in a contest shared by three schools.

Rome, in the winter of 537. Belisarius and his soldiers are preparing the city's walls as the army of the Gothic king Vitigis approaches.

In the spring of 568, King Alboin led the Lombards from Pannonia towards Italy. Beyond the Alpine passes lay a peninsula that had only recently emerged from a long war between the eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogoths.

In August 1995, Harry Potter stood in a London street and read an address written by Albus Dumbledore. Between two neighbouring houses, number twelve Grimmauld Place appeared: the concealed headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix.

At Clermont in central France, on 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II addressed a gathering at the close of a church council. He called for an armed journey east, towards the lands of Byzantium and Jerusalem.

At Rano Raraku on Rapa Nui, around the fifteenth century, stone carvers shaped a great figure from the side of a volcanic crater. Beyond the quarry, the Pacific stretched towards islands thousands of kilometres away.

In the Scottish Highlands, during the tenth century, four witches and wizards founded a school of magic. They called it Hogwarts, and its castle would shelter generations of students before becoming the setting of a final battle in 1998.

In Tournai in 1653, workers uncovered the grave of Childeric, a Frankish king who had died nearly twelve centuries earlier. Among the objects buried with him were a signet ring, Roman coins and tiny ornaments of gold.

In the summer of 1994, a Muggle campsite owner named Mr Roberts received an unusual crowd of visitors on Dartmoor. As witches and wizards gathered for the Quidditch World Cup, Ministry officials repeatedly altered his memory to preserve a secret that had been protected for three centuries.

At Stiklestad in Norway, in the summer of 1030, an army gathered around King Olaf Haraldsson. Among those later said to have fought beside him was his teenage half-brother Harald Sigurdsson.