2012 is a year to remember

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee festivities this summer marks one of a number of noble commemorations this year. Just a few days ago, the sixth of February saw the anniversary of the death of King George VI, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth II to the throne, inaugurating the Diamond Jubilee celebrations that will culminate during the first week of June.

The Queen will be only the second of our monarchs, along with Victoria, to have celebrated both a Diamond and a Golden Jubilee. And in part because she will be the only one  sovereigns ever to have celebrated a Silver Jubilee as well.

And this is only the beginning; for 2012 is set to be a bumper year for such commemorations. Between the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens and the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, yet to come are two significant but slightly ambiguous centenaries: the death of Captain Scott, which took place in March 1912, and the sinking of the Titanic in the following month.

Scott and his colleagues were beaten in the race to reach the South Pole by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and they died on the way back. And the Titanic, having been proudly and hubristically described as being unsinkable, did just that on its maiden voyage having hit an iceberg.

But neither of these episodes has ever been free from controversy and recrimination and both of them are a salutary reminder that challenging Mother Nature has always been a hazardous undertaking.

It's 200 years since Charles Dickens was born

If we go back another hundred years, 2012 also marks the bicentenary of an event that will undoubtedly receive less attention: the assassination of the then Prime Minster, Spencer Percival, which took place in the central lobby of the House of Commons on 11 May 1812.

There are two other good reasons why we should remember the year 1812. The first is that it witnessed the outbreak of war between the United Kingdom and the United States: a rarely-remembered conflict, which ended in stalemate three years later but not before the British had stormed the recently established federal capital in Washington and set fire to the White House.

The second was Napoleon's failed attempt to invade and conquer Russia, which effectively spelt the end of his imperial ambitions and would later be enduringly commemorated by Tolstoy in War and Peace and by Tchaikovsky in his 1812 Overture.

But these two episodes were also harbingers of a new world to come, not then, and not soon, but one day. For the failure of the British to defeat the Americans, and of the French to overwhelm the Russians, portended the bi-polar world dominated by the two super powers of the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which would last from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

So in one way and another, 2012 is going to be a big year for anniversaries.

Margaret Thatcher at the Tory Party conference the day after the bombing

The Queen at a tree planting ceremony for her Diamond Jubilee

Selection of 2012 anniversaries

7 February - Charles Dicken's 200th birthday

29 March - Captain Scott died 100 years ago

15 April - 100 years since the Titanic sunk

5 June - Queen's Diamond Jubilee

26 November - 70 years since the premiere of Casablanca