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Home , 8888 Uprising, Crime in New Mexico, Edwin Pearce Christy, Irek Mukhamedov, James Craig (barque), Johan Palmstruch

History Timeline from 13.7 Billion Years ago to August 2013. 1 of 588 pages

This PDF History Timeline has been extracted from the History World web site's time line.

The PDF is a very simplified version of the History World timeline. The PDF is stripped of all the links found on that timeline. If an entry attracts your interest and you want further detail, click on the link at the of each of the PDF pages and query the subject or the PDF entry on the web site, or simply do an internet search.

When I saw the History World timeline I wanted a copy of it for myself and my family in a form that we could access off-line, on demand, on the device of our choice. This PDF is the .

What attracted me particularly about the History World timeline is that each event, which might be earth shattering in itself with a wealth of detail sufficient to write volumes on, and indeed many such events have had volumes written on them, is presented as a sort of pared down news head-line. Basic unadorned fact.

Also, the History World timeline is multi-faceted. Most historic works focus on their own area of interest and ignore seemingly unrelated events, but this timeline offers glimpses of cross-sections of history for any given time, embracing art, politics, war, nations, religions, cultures and science, just to mention a few elements covered. The view is fascinating.

Then there is always the question of what should be included and what excluded. I don't always agree with the timeline from that perspective but I think they mostly include all the important stuff.

With a decent PDF viewer you should have no difficulty running queries and/or indexing the content. I use ez PDF Reader.

This PDF is available free at World History Time-Line Of course, the timeline in its entirety is available at History World.

Regarding updates – we will have to see.

I hope this PDF makes the history timeline and history itself more accessible.

Enjoy,

John Barrington.

This material is sourced at History World, & is available there in greater detail, with links History Timeline from 13.7 Billion Years ago to August 2013. 2 of 588 pages

2013 August 29 The House of Commons defeats on his plan to support US military intervention in Syria

2013 August 21 Bradley Manning, to be known henceforth as Chelsea Manning, is sentenced to 35 years in prison for his leaking of government documents

2013 August 21 Syrian government and rebels blame each other when a nerve gas attack kills more than 600 people in Saqba, a suburb of Damascus

2013 August 15 Egyptian soldiers use live ammunition to disperse Muslim supporters of President Morsi, killing about 600

2013 August 14 The Egyptian army declares a state of emergency after continuing Muslim demonstrations and imposes a curfew

2013 August 1 The American whistleblower Edward Snowden is granted a one-year visa to live in

2013 July 30 The first meeting in new Israel-Palestine peace talks takes place in Washington

2013 July 17 Same-sex marriage is legalized in and Wales

2013 from July 17 Egyptian troops begin using live ammunition against Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators

2013 July 13 A jury in Florida sparks nation-wide outrage by their acquittal of George Zimmerman on the charge of murdering a black teenager, Trayvon Martin

2013 July 7 Andy Murray wins the Men's Singles at Wimbledon, becoming the first Briton to do so since Fred Perry in 1936

2013 July 3 After mounting chaos in Egypt the army arrests President Morsi, legitimately elected, and takes control

2013 July 1 Croatia joins the European Union, as the 28th member

2013 June 30 Violent clashes erupt throughout Egypt between Muslim Brotherhood supporters of President Morsi and those objecting to his Islamist policies

2013 June 26 Julia Gillard, 's first female prime minister, is rejected in Labour party vote and is replaced by Kevin Rudd

2013 June 15 A cleric with moderate views, Hassan Rowhani, wins Iran's presidential election, raising international hopes for dialogue

2013 June 14-30 Flash floods in kill nearly 6000 people and isolate more than 20,000

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2013 June 6 , a UK newspaper, publishes the first of many scoops based on the secret files of the NSA and GCHQ, leaked by Edward Snowden

2013 June The Afghan Taliban project a new image, opening an office in Qatar

2013 May 27 The European Union lifts the ban on providing arms to the rebels in Syria

2013 May 22 In a street two men hack to death a British soldier, Lee Rigby, and tell passers-by that they are avenging killed by the army

2013 April 24 The collapse of a jerry-built garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, results in massive casualties and more than 1000 deaths

2013 May 5 Israel makes the first of two air strikes into Syria, targeting arsenals of the terrorist group Hezbollah

2013 April 19 After the arrest of the second Boston suspect it emerges that the terrorists are two Muslim brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

2013 April 18 Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspects in the Boston terrorist attack, is killed in a shoot-out with police

2013 April 15 Two pressure cooker bombs, planted near the finishing line of the Boston marathon, kill 3 and wound 264 spectators

2013 April 14 After the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro wins a close and stronngly disputed presidential election

2013 March 25 After a prolonged financial crisis Cyprus accepts stringent terms for a European Union €10 billion bailout

2013 March 14 Scientists at CERN announce that the recently discovered particle is beyond doubt the Standard Model of the Higg's boson

2013 March 14 Xi Jinping is elected the President of the People's Republic of China

2013 March 13 The Argentinian archbishop Jorge Bergoglio is elected pope and takes the name Francis in honour of St Francis of Assisi

2013 February 25 In the italian election Beppe Grillo's new Five Star Movement wins 25% of the votes but refuses to join any coalition

2013 February 28 Pope Benedict XVI resigns, the first pope to do so for 600 years

2013 February 15 A huge meteor enters the earth's atmosphere and explodes over Chelyabinsk in Russia, injuring more than 1000 people

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2013 February 14 Double-amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius is charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp

2013 February 12 North Korea carries out its third underground nuclear test

2013 January 21 Scientists at Cambridge university prove that there is quadruple helix DNA in humans, promising potential protection against cancer

2013 January 25 Violent erupt in Egypt against President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood

2013 January 22 Netanyahu wins the Israeli election, with second place taken by a moderate party,Yesh Atid, newly formed by Yair Lapid

2013 January 17 About forty foreign hostages and twenty-nine militants die when Algerian forces raid the In Amenas gas site

2013 January 11 Radical Islamists take more than 800 people hostage at the In Amenas Gas Project in Algeria

2013 January 11 French troops arrivee in Mali, at the government's request, to help in evicting radical Islamist groups from the north of the country

2012 December 14 Adam Lanza shoots and kills twenty children and six staff members in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connnecticut

2012 December 8 At a UN Climate Change conference in Qatar there is agreement to extend the existing Kyoto Protocol to 2020

2012 November 29 The UN General Assembly, defying Israel, grants Palestine the status of a non-member observer state

2012 November 6 Barack Obama wins second term, defeating Republican Mitt Romney In US presidential election

2012 October 30 Superstorm Sandy, after devastating much of the Caribbean, reaches the east coast of the USA, killing more than 100 people

2012 October 22 Experts who gave tragically wrong earthquake advice at L'Aquila in 2009 are given six-year sentences for manslaughter

2012 October 14 Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner, jumping from a balloon 24 miles up, becomes the first man to break the speed of sound in freefall

2012 October 12 In a controversial decision, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the European Union

2012 October 9 A gunman severely wounds a 14-year-old Pakistani girl, Malala

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Yousafzai, because of her protests against the Taliban suppression of girls' schools

2012 September 29 Burma's president says that he would accept Suu Kyi as his successor

2012 September 13 US embassies in Yemen and Egypt are attacked, as the protests against Innocence of Muslims spread

2012 September 11 The US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, is killed in a terrorist attack on the embassy in Benghazi

2012 September 11 Violent protests against the film Innocence of Muslims break out in Egypt and soon spread to other Muslim countries

2012 September 9 An excerpt of an anti-Islamic film made in the USA, Innocence of Muslims, is broadcast in Egypt on a Muslim TV channel

2012 December 12 North Korea successfully launches a powerful rocket, alarming the world with a new sign of military potential

2012 November 22 Mohamed Morsi issues a declaration giving himself virtually unlimited powers, leading to violent protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square

2012 August 28 Mitt Romney is formally nominated, at the Republican convention in Tampa, as the party's presidential candidate politics

2012 August 11 Mitt Romney selects Paul Ryan, a more hardline Republican, as his vice-presidential candidate

2012 August 6 Curiosity, NASA's roving science laboratory, lands successfully on Mars after a 354 million-mile journey through space

2012 August 1 The US swimmer Michael Phelps wins his 19th Olympic medal to become the most successful competitor in the history of the games

2012 July 10 Russia and China again veto a UN Security Council attempt to apply economic sanctions on Syria

2012 July 4 CERN announces the discovery of a new particle, possibly the much anticipated Higgs boson, in the Large Hadron Collider

2012 June 24 Mohamed Morsi, a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, becomes Egypt's first democratically elected president

2012 June 24 The death of Lonesome George, a giant tortoise in the Galapagos Islands, means that his subspecies becomes extinct

2012 June 19 The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, breaks bail and seeks asylum

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in the Equadorian embassy in London

2012 June 8 The UN declares that the violence in Syria has become civil war

2012 June 2 An Egyptian court sentences former president Hosni Mubarak to life imprisonment

2012 May 22 A pastel version of Edvard Munch's The Scream sells for US $120 million, by far the record for any work of art

2012 May 10 The largest US bank, JPMorgan Chase, announces losses of two billion dollars

2012 May 6 François Hollande defeats Nicolas Sarkozy and becomes president of

2012 June 24 Mohamed Morsi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, wins the presidential elect in Egypt with 51% of the vote

2012 April 13 The rocket Kwangmyongsong-3 breaks up less than two minutes after its launch, in North Korea's third attempt to put a satellite into space

2012 April 1 and her party win almost all the 45 seats in Burma's nation-wide by-elections

2012 March 15 The Taliban response to the murder of villagers is to suspend peace talks with the US and the Karzai government

2012 March 13 244 years after its launch in Scotland in 1768 the Encyclopedia Britannica publishes its final printed edition

2012 March 10 An American soldier leaves his barracks and kills 17 villagers, including 9 children, in

2012 March 4 Vladimir Putin is elected president in Russia, prompting large public protests and widespread allegations of fraud

2012 February 27 After violent protests in the Yemen the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, cedes power and leaves the country

2012 February 6 The Diamond of Jubilee of Elizabeth II marks the 60th anniversary of her succession as Queen of the UK and Head of the Commonwealth

2012 February 4 Russia and China use their Security Council veto to block a UN resolution to end the violence in Syria

2012 February 1 About 80 people are killed and more than 1000 injured in a clash between fans at a football match in the Egyptian city Port Said

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2012 January 23 The European Union imposes an oil embargo on Iran to deter efforts to achieve a nuclear weapon

2012 January 13 The Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia crashes into a rock near the Italian island of Giglio, killing 32 people

2011 December 29 Iran blames the USA and Israel for the murder of one of their nuclear scientists by a suicide bomber on a motorcyle

2011 December 29 Samoa and Tokelau move themselves from east to west of the International Date Line to coincide their date with their nearest trading partners

2011 December 20 NASA's Kepler mission discovers the first two earth-size planets outside our solar system

2011 December 15 The USA formally declares an end to the Iraq War

2011 November 26 NASA launches a rocket carrying the roving science laboratory Curiosity, which is programmed to land on Mars on 6 August 2012

2011 November 18 Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam is captured when attempting to flee to Niger and is held for trial

2011 October-December At some time during this period the world's population is estimated to have reached seven billion

2011 October 31 UNESCO admits Palestine as a member after a vote with a large majority in favour

2011 October 18 The Libyan leader Muammad Gaddafi is captured and killed in Sirte

2011 October 18 Hamas releases the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1027 Palestinian and Israeli-Arab prisoners held in Israel

2011 September 11 The Occupy Wall Street begins and its PR success prompts the Occupy movement around the world

2011 September 5 India and Pakistan agree to resolve their various border disputes and to set about finding the most appropriate compromise in each case

2011 August-September Unusually heavy monsoon rains cause massive flooding in Pakistan, with some 5 million people forced to leave their homes

2011 August 22 Juno, a solar-powered spacecraft, is launched from Cape Carnaveral on a mission to Jupiter

2011 August 6 Standard & Poor's downgrades the USA's credit rating from AAA to AA+,

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further increasing the sense of gloom in stock exchanges

2011 August 5 NASA announces that it has photographic evidence from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of possible liquid water on the planet in warm seasons

2011 August 3 Hosni Mubarak appears in court on a hospital bed on the first day of his trial on the capital charge of premeditated killing of peaceful protesters

2011 July With no sign of a deal between Obama and Republicans on raising the debt limit, fears grow that the USA might default on its debts on August 2

2011 July The funding crisis in the Eurozone extends to fears of potential government default in the large economies of and

2011 July 31 In response to the continuing uprising the Syrian government launches an attack with tanks against several of the country's cities, in particular Hama

2011 July 31 President Obama announces a last-minute deal with congressional leaders on the debt limit, temporarily calming the fears of the financial markets

2011 The commander of the rebel forces in Libya, Abdel Fattah Younes, is assassinated in mysterious circumstances while in rebel hands

2011 July 22 Eurozone leaders agree a second bail-out package for of €109 billion

2011 July 22 Anders Behring Breivik shoots and kills 69 young people on the Norwegian island of Uteya after killing eight with a bomb in government buildings in Oslo

2011 July 21 The return of Space Shuttle Atlantis to the Kennedy Space Centre ends NASA's 20-year space shuttle programme

2011 July 20 The United Nations declares southern Somalia to be in a state of famine, with the disastrous lack of rain driving thousands of refugees into Ethiopia and Kenya

2011 July 20 Goran Hadzic is arrested in Serbia, completing the detention of all 161 people from the former Yugoslavia indicted by the International Criminal Court

2011 July 9 Following the referendum result earlier in the year, South Sudan secedes from the Sudan to become the independent Republic of South Sudan

2011 July 7 Surgeons in achieve the first artificial living organ transplant, after using the patient's own stem cells to coat a plastic replica of his windpipe

2011 June 4 President Saleh of Yemen is flown to Egypt for medical treatment, after being wounded on the previous day by an explosion in the government compound in Sana'a

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2011 May 28 A court in Cairo finds Hosni Mubarak guilty of damaging the national economy by severing internet connections on January 26 and fines him about US $34 million

2011 May 26 Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander wanted for war crimes at Srebrenica in 1995, is arrested in Serbia and subsequently extradited to the Hague

2011 May 2 At 1.a.m. Osama bin Laden is killed in his house in Abbottabad, in Pakistan, by a special forces team of US Navy SEALs

2011 April 29 Prince William marries Kate Middleton in London's Westminster Abbey in a ceremony watched by millions of viewers around the world

2011 April 11 The civil war in Ivory Coast is perhaps ended by the capture of former president, and recently defeated presidential candidate, Laurent Gbagbo

2011 March 30 In a relaxation of military rule in Burma Thein Sein is sworn in as the first civilian president

2011 March 20 The first air strikes by NATO, authorized by the UN, destroy sufficient of Gaddafi's armour just in time to save Benghazi from a proclaimed massacre of rebel civilians

2011 March 19 Muammar Gaddafi's tanks are on the verge of reaching Benghazi to enter the city and carry out his promised cleansing of the city of rebel traitors

2011 March 17 The United Nations Security Council passes Resolution 1973, authorizing the international community to use force to protect civilians in Libya

2011 March 17 Muammar Gaddafi makes a rousing speech on Libyan TV saying that his people will seek out traitors and infidels in Benghazi 'alley by alley' to deal with them

2011 March 14 Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates agree to send troops and police to strengthen government forces in Bahrain

2011 March 11 Nearly 20,000 people are killed and more than 125,000 buildings destroyed or severely damaged by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami

2011 March 11 The Japanese tsunami results in a nuclear crisis and massive evacuation because of meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant

2011 March 11 A massive earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan causes a huge tsunami resulting in massive devastation for miles inland

2011 March 9 King Mohammed VI of Morocco announces in a televised address that he is taking steps to introduce constitutional reforms

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2011 February 26 Benghazi, by now firmly in the control of rebels, becomes the temporary headquarters of Libya's newly formed National Transitional Council

2011 February 20 A demonstration in Rabat demands that the king of Morocco relinquish some of his powers is followed by King Mohammed VI announcing on television plans for reform

2011 February 18 The demands of protesters in Bahrain extend to include the overthrow of the monarchy, after a second day of government forces using live rounds

2011 February 17 Police in Bahrain make a night raid on peaceful protesters encamped in the capital city's Pearl Roundabout, killing three

2011 February 15 Demonstrations over the arrest of a human rights lawyer in Benghazi, Libya's second city, are violently broken up by the police

2011 February 11 After nearly three weeks of escalating violence in Egypt, President Mubarak announces his resignation

2011 February 7 The results are published of the Southern Sudan referendum on independence, with more than 98% voting in favour of the break from Sudan

2011 January 28 On what becomes known as the 'Friday of Anger' hundreds of thousands demonstrate in Egypt after Friday prayers, a developing tradition in the Arab Spring

2011 January 27 A major demonstration is held in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, demanding the resignation of the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh

2011 January 26 Protests begin in Syria, rising over the following months to the level of an uprising as demands for Bashar al-Assad to resign are met with increasing brutality

2011 January 26 Recognizing the use made by demonstrators of Facebook and Twitter, the Egyptian government shuts down internet access for most of the country

2011 January 25 Inspired by the example of Tunisia, a day of revolt is organized in Egypt, in protest against police methods and to coincide with National Police Day

2011 January 14 Ben Ali, in control of Tunisia for 23 years, resigns and flees to Saudi Arabia after four weeks of mounting tension and violence in the streets

2011 January 14 anti-gpovernment protests begin in Jordan, soon causing King Abdullah to form a new cabinet with the brief to introduce reform

2010 December 21 A total lunar eclipse in the northern hemisphere coincides with the winter solstice for the first time since 1638

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2010 December 19 Demonstrators gather in the streets of Sidi Bouzid as news of Mohamed Bouazizi's action spreads, in a mood that sparks the Tunisian revolution and the 'Arab Spring'

2010 December 17 Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, sets himself on fire in protest at harassment and confiscation of his wares by local officials

2010 November 29 The European Union agrees a rescue package of €85 billion to deal with the financial crisis in the republic of Ireland

2010 November 28 Wikileaks publishes another batch of US government documents, this time diplomatic cables of which about 100,000 are maked 'secret' or 'confidential'

2010 November 23 North Korea shells the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, causing four deaths and a dangerous deterioration in relations with

2010 November 17 CERN announces its successful production and brief capture of toms of antihydrogen, the first observed example of antimatter

2010 November 13 Aung San Suu Kyi is released from in Rangoon under certain conditions

2010 October 13 Thirty-three miners are brought safely to the surface after being trapped deep underground for 69 days in the San José mine in Chile

2010 August 3 US Federal estimates are that more than 200 million of oil have spilled into the sea from the Deepwater Horizon disaster (the Exxon Valdez figure was 11 million)

2010 July 31 Disastrous monsoon floods northwest Pakistan, killing more than 1600 people, displacing as many as 20 million and ruining crops

2010 July 25 The website Wikileaks publlishes more than 90,000 classified internal reports about US involvement in Afghanistan since 2004

2010 July 21 President Obama signs into law a sweeping and radical package of reforms in the control of the US financial sector

2010 July 15 BP announces that a newly fitted cap has finally stopped the Deepwater Horizon oil mspill in the Gulf of Mexico

2010 July 11 Spain beats the 1-0 in the final of the FIFA World Cup in the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg

2010 July 8 The Solar Impulse, promoted by Bertrand Piccard and piloted by André Borschberg, becomes the first solar-powered aircraft to fly for more than 24 hours

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2010 June 11 Ethnic violence against the Uzbek minority erupts in the Jalal-Abad region of Kyrgyzstan, lasting several days and resulting in more than 200 deaths

2010 May 31 Israeli soldiers board an aid flotilla headed for Gaza and in the resulting violence kill nine Turkish activists on the Mavi Marmara

2010 May 20 Geneticist Craig Venter announces that his team have inserted the genome of a bacterium into a cell to create the world's first synthetic life form

2010 May 11 Conservative leader David Cameron becomes UK prime minister, forming a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats and appointing Nick Clegg as his deputy prime minister

2010 May 6 The UK general election results in no overall majority, with the Conservatives winning 306 seats, the Labour party 258 and the Libereral Democrats 57

2010 May 1 Severe austerity measures in Greece persuade to back an increased EU and IMF bail-out package of 110 billion euros

2010 April 27 Greece's credit rating is downgraded by Standard & Poor to BB+ ('junk'), causing a run on global stock markets

2010 April 23 Greece is promised an EU and IMF bail-out package of 45 billion euros to cope with its high level of national debt

2010 April 20 An explosion destroys BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killing eleven people and starting a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

2010 April 15 President Bakyev of Kyrgyzstan resigns and escapes into exile in

2010 April 14 Volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano beneath a glacier in Iceland,disrupts northern air traffic for several days

2010 April 10 A plane carrying the president of , Lech Kaczynski, and other high Polish officials crashes on the way to a commemoration of the Katyn massacre, killing all 96 people on board

2010 April 7 Violent riots break out in Kyrgyzstan, causing the president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, to flee from the capital, Bishek

2010 March 21 President Obama's radical bill of health care reform is passed by a margin of seven votes in the House of Representatives and is signed into law two days later

2010 February 3 A sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, L'Homme qui marche, sets a new

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auction record for a work of art at £65 million (US$103.7 million)

2010 January 12 Haiti is devastated by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, causing more than 230,000 deaths

2010 January 4 The Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai is inaugurated, entering the record books as the world tallest building at 828 m (2717 ft)

2009 December 14 Abu Dhabi provides Dubai with $10 billion of debt relief, reducing the threat of a new major financial crisis

2009 December 1 The Treaty of Lisbon is passed into law in the European Union

2009 November 20 Global stock markets fall when Dubai seems in danger of being unable to service its massive $80 billion of debt

2009 November 20 CERN restarts the Large Hadron Collider, which has been shut down since a serious failure in Sepember 2008

2009 November 19 Herman van Rompuy, the prime minister of , is voted the first full-time president of the European Council

2009 November 3 The becomes the final member state of the European Union to approve the Lisbon Treaty, completing the process of ratification

2009 October 2 The Treaty of Lisbon, rejected by the Irish people in 2008, is approved in a second referendum

2009 The Orleans House Gallery reaches the final shortlist of four for the prestigious £100,000 annual prize awarded each year by the Art Fund

2009 August 20 Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted in 2001 for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, is released as being terminally ill and returns from Scotland to Libya

2009 July 5 Riots break out in Urumchi, in northwest China, in hostilities between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese

2009 June 29 Iran's Guardian Council decrees that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election was valid, amid increasingly strong crackdown on any sign of dissent

2009 June 25 The sudden death of the pop star Michael Jackson triggers a world-wide emotional response

2009 June 12 Iran's declaration that its presidential election has been a landslide victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad brings vast crowds of protesters onto the streets

2009 June 11 The World Health Organization declares that "swine flu" (strain H1N1, spreading from Mexico), has reached the status of a pandemic

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2009 May 21 North Korea announces that it has carried out a second successful nuclear test

2009 May 18 The long civil war in Sri Lanka ends with the conclusive defeat of the Tamil Tigers by government forces

2009 April 7 Peru's Supreme Court finds Alberto Fujimori guilty of authorizing death squads and sentences him to 25 years in prison

2009 April 5 A major earthquake around L'Aquila, in Italy, kills more than 300 people after experts advise local people that it is safe to stay at home

2009 March 4 The International Criminal Court in the Hague issues a warrant for the arrest of the Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on a charge of war crimes

2009 February 17 President Obama, applying Keynesian economics, announces a massive stimulus package for the US economy (its eventual cost turns out to be $862 bn)

2009 February 11 becomes prime minister of , six months after agreeing to share power with Robert Mugabe

2009 February 2 Iran launches a satellite into orbit on an Iranian-built rocket

2009 February 1 In the Icelandic crisis Johanna Siguroardottir becomes prime minister and forms a new government

2009 January 26 The prime minister of Iceland, Geir Haarde, resigns after the collapse of his country's banking system

2009 January 22 One of President Obama's first acts in office is to sign an order that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is to be closed within a year (a promise that fails to be fulfilled)

2009 January 21 Israel completes a military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, nearly three weeks after launching its invasion of the territory

2009 January 20 Amid unprecedented international enthusiasm Barack Obama is inaugurated as the fourteenth President of the USA

2009 January 15 The pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 lands his plane on 's Hudson River with no loss of life among his 155 passengers and crew

2009 January 3 Israel escalates its war against Hamas by launching a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip

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2008 Israel begins an intense series of airstrikes against targets in the Gaza Strip, in response to rockets launched by Hamas

2008 A series of terrorist attacks on several targets in Mumbai result in nearly 200 deaths

2008 Democratic candidate Barack Obama defeats John McCain to become the first African-American to be elected President of the USA

2008 October 26 A huge fire at Garrick's Villa does enormous damage to building and several flats are gutted

2008 In the face of a major financial crisis the Icelandic government takes control of the country's three largest banks

2008 The Dow Jones index suffers its largest one-day fall (777 points) when the US House of Representatives rejects President Bush's emergency package

2008 Kgalema Motlanthe is elected temporary President of the Republic of South Africa after the resignation of Mbeki

2008 Thabo Mbeki resigns as President of South Africa, after losing the support of his party, the African National Congress

2008 The Hadron Collider at Cern has to be halted when a serious fault develops, leading to a predicted six-month delay in the programme

2008 The Large Hadron Collider, at Cern in , begins accelerating protons round a 17-mile circular tunnel

2008 The US government intervenes to rescue two important financial government sponsored enterprises, Fannie May and Freddie Mac

2008 Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, is elected president of Pakistan

2008 Archaeologists from Tübingen discover the Hohle Fels Venus, about 38,000 years old and the earliest known figurative sculpture in Europe

2008 Hurricane Hanna causes more than 500 deaths in Haiti before moving on west to the United States (where it kills 7)

2008 With troops now stationed in the breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia unilaterally recognizes both as independent republics

2008 Nine years after seizing power in a coup, Pervez Musharraf resigns as president of Pakistan under threat of impeachment

2008 In the Beijing Olympics swimmer Michael Phelps wins 8 gold medals, beating Mark

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Spitz's record of 7 in the 1972 games

2008 Georgian armed forces enter the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia, p rovoking a powerful armed response from Russia

2008 After 12 years in hiding the Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic, wanted for war crimes, is found in disguse and is arrested in Belgrade

2008 Kibaki and Odinga sign an agreement, brokered by Kofi Annan, to share power in a Kenyan coalition government

2008 Robert Mugabe wins the second round in Zimbabwe's presidential election after Morgan Tsvangirai has withdrawn from the contest due to widespread violence against his supporters

2008 June 5 Peter Robinson, elected unopposed as leader of the DUP, succeeds Ian Paisley as First Minister of Northern Ireland

2008 In a referendum in Ireland voters reject the Treaty of Lisbon, which has the effect of halting ratification throughout the European Union

2008 After a long drawn out contest, Barack Obama defeats Hillary Clinton to win the nomination as presidential candidate for the Democratic party

2008 Nepal becomes a republic after the Assembly votes by a large majority to abolish the monarchy

2008 Cyclone Nargis kills at least 130,000 people and possibly many more in Burma (the number is uncertain due to government efforts to downplay the disaster)

2008 The Taliban fail in an assassination attempt on Afghan president Hamid Karzai

2008 After being in power for 62 years (from 1946) the Colorado Party is defeated in Paraguay's presidential election

2008 A coalition led by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi wins the general election in Italy

2008 After months of controversy over his financial affairs, Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern announces that he will resign on May 6

2008 Evidence suggests that Tsvangirai has won Zimbabwe's presidential election, but after a delay of more than a month it is announced that a second round run-off is required

2008 In Bhutan's first general election, the Peace and Prosperity Party wins 45 of the 47 seats in the National Assemby

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2008 Demonstrations in Tibet turn violent as protesters target Chinese buildings and individuals

2008 Vladimir Putin's hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, is elected President of Russia

2008 March 4 Ian Paisley announces that he will stand down as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and First Minister of Northern Ireland

2008 John McCain claims the Republican presidential nomination in a victory speech in Dallas

2008 The New York Philharmonic performs in North Korea, in the first significant cultural contact between USA and North Korea since the

2008 The National Assembly elects 's brother Raúl to succeed him as president of Cuba

2008 President Musharraf's party is heavily defeated. with Opposition parties winning more than half the seats in Pakistan's general election

2008 After 49 years as president of Cuba, Fidel Castro resigns for reasons of ill health

2008 Australian prime minister Kevn Rudd formally apologizes to the 'Stolen Generations'

2008 Stock markets plunge around the world as fears grow over the US subprime mortgage crisis

2008 Italian prime minister Romano Prodi resigns after a foreign policy defeat in the Senate

2008 Tribal violence against Kikuyu supporters of Kibaki follows his insistence, against independent evidence, that he has won Kenya's presidential election

2008 US President Bush signs into law a $700 billion emergency fund to purchase failing bank assets

2007 A bomb blast kills Benazir Bhutto and at least 20 others after an election rally in Rawalpindi

2007 Incumbent president Mwai Kibaki is declared the winner of Kenya's election - a doubtful result rejected by his opponent Raila Odinga

2007 Jacob Zuma is elected president of the African National Congress in South Africa, in place of Thabo Mbeki

2007 European leaders sign the Treaty of Lisbon, an attempt to achieve administrative reforms similar to those of the previously rejected Constitution

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2007 President Musharraf resigns as head of the Pakistan army, and is succeeded by General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani

2007 The Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, wins the federal election in Australia, defeating John Howard's Liberal Party

2005 Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest nearly 20 years after winning Burma' only free election

2007 Cristina Fernández de Kirchner wins the presidential election in Argentina, becoming the first woman to do so

2007 The first passenger flight on the massive Airbus A380 goes from Singapore to , with Singapore Airlines

2007 On the evening of Benazir Bhutto's return suicide bombers kill 136 of her supporters, who are lining the route, but fail to kill her

2007 After eight years abroad, Benazir Bhutto returns to Pakistan to contest a coming election

2007 The Chilean Supreme Court grants the Peruvian government's request for the extradition of Alberto Fujimori to Peru

2007 Estimates of the number of deaths in the suppression of the Burmese uprising range from a few hundred to several thousand

2007 Ibrahim Gambari is allowed to visit Aung San Suu Kyi at her residence, and has another meeting on October 2

2007 The streets of Rangoon are virtually empty, with crowds dispersed by fear during the day and by curfew at night

2007 Ibrahim Gambari, a United Nations envoy, arrives in Rangoon

2007 The Burma junta seals the country off by blocking all internet access

2007 Burmese monasteries are raided, and are arrested and taken away all over the country

2007 After continuing daily escalation of the protest in Burma, nation-wide, the junta order arrests and military intervention

2007 Burmese security forces raid the monasteries and begin beating and arresting monks to terrify the population into submission

2007 Large numbers of monks in Burma march in support of the escalating nation-wide

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demonstrations against the government

2007 Demonstrations begin in Burma against the recent increase in fuel prices

2007 The Burmese government removes fuel subsidies, causing massive price rises for consumers

2007 Gordon Brown succeeds Tony Blair as leader of the Labour Party and prime minister of the

2007 The civil rights group Reporters Without Borders demands improvement in civil rights abuses and censorship in China before the Beijing Olympics

2007 Barry Bonds breaks baseball's previous record, hitting his 756th home run

2007 Pratibha Patil is elected President of India, the first woman to hold the post

2007 Apple's iPhone goes on sale in the USA and 270,000 are sold in the first thirty hours

2007 After major damage by fire, the elegant Grade 2 house of West Hall is restored by the Bissell Thomas family

2007 Bertie Ahern and the Fianna Fáil win their third successive general election victory in Ireland

2007 Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, takes over as first minister of Scotland

2007 Tony Blair gives June 27 as the date for his promised resignation as British prime minister

2007 Devolved government returns to Northern Ireland, with Ian Paisley as first minister and Martin McGuinness as his deputy

2007 Nicolas Sarkozy defeats Ségolène Royal to become President of the French Republic

2007 The Scottish National Party wins Scotland's election, becoming for the first time the party with the widest support in Scotland

2007 Democratic US Senator Barrack Obama announces to a cheering crowd in Illinois that he is joining the 2008 presidential race

2007 US Senator John McCain launches his 2008 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination

2007 Thirty-two and teachers are killed by a gunman at Virginia Tech, in the USA's worst ever campus massacre

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2007 Long-term enemies Ian Paisley (DUP) and Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein) agree to share power in a reconvened Northern Ireland Assembly

2007 Morgan Tsvangirai is arrested on his way to a prayer rally in Harare, and is severely beaten and tortured in police custody

2007 Elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly bring the same result as in 2003, with extremist rivals DUP and Sinn Fein the dominant parties

2007 North Korea agrees to begin shutting down its nuclear facilities in return for an ongoing programme of fuel aid

2007 A lease on Strawberry Hill house is granted to the Strawberry Hill Trust and restoration of the house begins.

2007 Democratic US Senator Hillary Clinton launches her 2008 presidential bid, posting the message 'I'm in' on her website

2007 The International Red Cross and Red Crescent adopt the Red Crystal for use where a non-religious emblem is preferred

2007 China carries out a successful test of a ground-based missile that can destroy satellites in orbit

2007 Democrat Nancy Pelosi is elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives, becoming the first woman to hold the post

2007 and join the European Union, bringing the number of member states to twenty-seven

2007 South Korea's Ban Ki-moon becomes the UN secretary-general, following the retirement of Kofi Annan

2006 New South stand opens at Twickenham rugby stadium increasing capacity to 82,000.

2006 Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is hanged in Baghdad, a month after being convicted of a few of his crimes

2006 The prime minister, Tony Blair, is questioned by police in Britain's 'cash for honours' enquiry

2006 Patriarch Christodoulos has talks with Pope Benedict XVI, in the first official visit to the Vatican by the head of the Greek Orthodox church

2006 The Republicans lose control of both houses of the US Congress in an electoral backlash against the Iraq War

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2006 Daniel Ortega wins the Nicaraguan presidential election, returning to the office after 16 years

2006 An Iraqi court sentences former dictator Saddam Hussein and two of his senior colleagues to death by hanging

2006 The United States Census Bureau announces that the US population has reached 300 million

2006 Google pays $1.65 billion for the website YouTube, launched less than two years previously

2006 North Korea announces that it has tested a nuclear weapon

2006 A milk-truck driver opens fire on children in an Amish school in Pennsylvania, killing five girls and wounding others

2006 A military coup in removes the prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, from office

2006 A team from the University of Tübingen find a tiny figurine of a mammoth, at that time the earliest known piece of European figurative sculpture

2006 Martin Scorsese directs Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson in a crime thriller, The Departed

2006 The International Astronomical Union demotes Pluto to the new category of 'dwarf planet'

2006 A UN-sponsored cease-fire comes into effect in the conflict between Israeli and Hezbollah forces in south Lebanon

2006 After extensive restoration, what is now called Kew Palace (previously the Dutch House) is opened again to the public.

2006 The Pagoda in Kew Gardens is reopened to the public, providing a wonderful view for those willing to pay extra and climb the 253 steps to the top.

2006 Hezbollah takes two Israeli soldiers hostage, provoking the renewal of air and rocket warfare on the Israel-Lebanon border

2006 A series of coordinated terrorist bombs explode on trains during the crowded evening rush hour in Mumbai (Bombay)

2006 Yoweri Museveni wins his third term as president of Uganda, in an election result provoking riots by opposition supporters

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2006 North Korea test-fires seven missiles, of varying ranges and with varying success

2006 The US Supreme Court rules that the military courts set up to try detainees in Guantanamo Bay are illegal

2006 Warren Buffett pledges a multi-billion dollar grant to the Bill & Melina Gates Foundation, spread over the next 20 years

2006 Hamas militants take hostage an Israeli corporal, provoking a new Israeli military campaign against Gaza

2006 As the result of a referendum, Montegro declares its indpependence from Serbia

2006 Structural work is completed on China's Three Gorges Dam, by far the largest hydroelectric dam in the world

2006 Latin Americans in the USA stage the Great American , a day of non- cooperation to demand immigration reform

2006 Ehud Olmert, Sharon's successor as leader of Kadima, becomes Israel's prime minister at the head of a coalition government

2006 Romano Prodi becomes Italy's prime minister after narrowly defeating Silvio Berlusconi in a general election

2006 The Scottish National Party lays a charge that peerages are being 'sold' in Britain, provoking a police enquiry and a 'cash for honours' crisis

2006 Kadima, the party founded by Ariel Sharon, wins the most seats in the Israeli elections

2006 The terrorist organization ETA declares what it says will be a permanent ceasefire in its campaign for Basque independence

2006 Slobodan Milosevic dies of a heart attack in gaol in the Hague, with his trial for war crimes in Yugoslavia still incomplete

2006 British actress Helen Mirren plays Elizabeth II in the film The Queen (for which she later wins an Oscar)

2006 More than £53 million is stolen in a raid on the Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent – the UK's largest robbery

2006 Hamas, defined in many countries as a terrorist organization, wins the majority of seats in elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council

2006 Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party, wins the federal election in Canada and forms a minority government

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2006 Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon suffers a massive stroke which leaves him in a coma

2005 The first general election is held in Iraq, for 275 members of a permanent Iraqi General Assembly

2005 David Cameron wins the Tory leadership election, succeeding as the Leader of the Opposition in Britain

2005 French surgeon Bernard Devauchelle and his team in Amiens carry out the first human face transplant

2005 Angela Merkel, leader of the CDU, replaces Gerhard Schröder and becomes Germany's first woman chancellor

2005 The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, resigns from his party (Likud) with the intention of forming a new one (Kadima)

2005 Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, after sheltering since 2000 in Japan, arrives unexpectedly in Chile

2005 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad causes international outrage by describing Israel as a blot that should be 'wiped off the map'

2005 Fliint tools from more than 800,000 years ago are discovered at Happisburgh in Norfolk, evidence of human habitation in Britain some 300,000 years earlier than previously thought

2005 An earthquake kills more than 70,000 people in inaccessible regions near Muzaffarabad in the Pakistan part of Kashmir

2005 Just three years after the first attack, suicide bombers kill more than 25 people in the same Balinese town of Kuta

2005 Controversial cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad are published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten

2005 In the New Zealand election Helen Clark wins a third term as prime minister

2005 Hurricane Katrina brings flooding and chaos to New Orleans and other coastal areas, causing more than 1500 deaths

2005 Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, is a sensitive account of a homosexual relationship between two Wyoming cowboys

2005 Israel uses force to remove settlers who refuse to leave Gaza in accordance with Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan

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2005 The Provisional IRA announces a formal end to armed conflict and orders units to dump all their weapons

2005 US cyclist Lance Armstrong retires from competition after winning a seventh successive victory in the Tour de France

2005 A Brazilian citizen, Jean Charles de Menezes, is killed on the by police mistaking him for a terrorist

2005 Four English suicide bombers cause 52 deaths on London's transport system during the morning rush hour

2005 Fundamentalist politician Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is elected president of Iran

2005 After a long trial US singer Michael Jackson is declared in a California court not guilty on ten charges of child molestation

2005 The French people become the first to reject, in a referendum, the proposed European Constitution

2005 The film series of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia is launched with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

2005 Two years after its first appearance, the World Health Organization announces that the deadly disease SARS has been 'eradicated'

2005 Tony Blair wins the Labour party an unprecedented third successive term, but with a majority reduced from 167 to 66

2005 The superjumbo Airbus A380 makes its first test flight from Toulouse

2005 Following local and international pressure after the death of Rafik Hariri, Syria withdraws the last of its troops from Lebanon

2005 Joseph Ratzinger is elected pope and takes the name Benedict XVI

2005 Patriarch Christodoulos attends the funeral in Rome of Pope John Paul II

2005 The Prince of Wales marries Camilla Parker Bowles, subsequently to be known as the Duchess of Cornwall

2005 John Paul II, dying after 26 years on the papal throne, is the third longest-serving pope in history

2005 A at Red Lake High School in Minnesota kills five fellow students and two staff members before committing suicide

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2005 Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri is killed when a massive bomb is detonated as his car passes in Beirut

2005 Mahmoud Abbas is elected president of the Palestinian Authority, following the death of Yasser Arafat

2004 Martin Scorsese directs Leonardo DiCaprio as the eccentric aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, in The Aviator

2004 The footbridge at Kew Gardens station is restored with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant

2004 Opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko easily wins the re-run of the rigged presidential election in the

2004 A massive earthquake under the Indian Ocean triggers a tsunami that kills nearly 200,000 people

2004 Armed robbers, suspected of links with the IRA, steal more than £25 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast

2004 Tests reveal that Viktor Yushchenko, opposition candidate in Ukraine's presidential election, has been poisoned with dyoxin

2004 Hamid Karzai becomes the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan

2004 Prime minister Viktor Yanukovych is at first declared winner of a rigged (and subsequently annulled) presidential election in Ukraine

2004 Palestinian president Yasser Arafat dies in a hospital near

2004 George W. Bush wins a second term, defeating Democrat John Kerry in the US presidential election

2004 Representatives of the member states of the European Union accept a proposed European Constitution, subject to its ratification by each state

2004 Mark Edwards builds replicas of the boats used in 1829 in the first Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, and the universities race them again over the original Henley course

2004 The National Physical Laboratory develops a new system of measuring time by bombarding a single strontium atom, frozen to -273C, with tiny packages of light

2004 Chechen terrorists take an entire school hostage, in Beslan in southern Russia, resulting in more than 300 deaths

2004 Michael Schumacher becomes the first driver to win seven world championship

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titles in Formula One

2004 The Governors of the Royal Star & Garter Home announce plans for it to be replaced by three new purpose-built care homes elsewhere in the UK, and the building is put up for sale

2004 Ten new member states (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungrary, Malta, Cyprus) join the European Union

2004 Abuses in the US military prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq are revealed on US television

2004 The Annan UN plan for the reunification of Cyprus is approved by the Turkish community but rejected by the Greeks

2004 In Russia's presidential election Vladimir Putin easily wins a second term

2004 Bombs explode simultaneously on several commuter trains in Madrid during the morning rush hour, killing 190 people

2004 For the second time president Jean-Bertrand Aristide is forced to flee from Haiti, after losing control to opposition rebels

2004 Lord Hutton publishes his report into the circumstances leading up to the suicide of Dr David Kelly

2004 Mikheil Saakashvili, the real winner of 's November 2003 presidential election, has a resounding victory in the replay

2003 The Asgill House Beech receives a riverside plaque recording it as one of the Great Trees of London

2003 Permission is granted for 3 concerts a year at Twickenham rugby ground and the Rolling Stones play the first concert.

2003 Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is found hiding in a subterranean hole in a farmyard near Tikrit

2003 Ian Paisley's hard-line Democratic Unionist Party wins in elections to the suspended Northern Ireland Assembly

2003 The 'Rose Revolution' in Georgia forces the resignation of president Eduard Shevardnadze after rigged elections

2003 US singer Britney Spears creates a new record when she has a fourth successive album (In the Zone) go straight to the top of Billboard 200

2003 The last three Concorde airliners to carry fare-paying passengers land within a space of five minutes at Heathrow

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2003 Californians vote to remove governor Gray Davis from office in a 'recall' election and to replace him with Arnold Schwarzenegger

2003 Sweden's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Anna Lindh, is stabbed in a Stockholm department store and dies the following day

2003 Lost in Translation, a film directed by Sofia Coppola, depicts the culture shock of an American couple in modern Japan

2003 US tennis player Pete Sampras retires with a record total of 14 Grand Slam titles

2003 UK scientist David Kelly commits suicide, apparently for reasons linked with the Iraq War

2003 The Public Records Office and the Historic Manuscripts Commission come together to form The National Archives

2003 The UN Security Council and the Polisario accept a plan for the future of Western Sahara, proposed by James Baker, but it is rejected by Morocco

2003 Finding Nemo, following the adventures of a clownfish, wins an Oscar for Pixar Animation as the Best Animated Feature

2003 President Bush prematurely celebrates his Iraq achievement with a speech on a US aircraft carrier in front of a banner declaring 'Mission Accomplished'

2003 US forces are in control of Baghdad and an excited crowd topples from its plinth a massive statue of Saddam Hussein

2003 US, British, Australian and Polish forces invade Iraq

2003 Hu Jintao succeeds Jiang Zemin as president of the People's Republic of China

2003 Zoran Dindić, the prime minister of Serbia, is assassinated in Belgrade

2003 A deadly new form of pneumonia, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) is first reported in Hanoi and soon spreads globally

2003 Civil war breaks out in the Darfur region of the Sudan, resulting in large numbers of civilian deaths and accusations of government-sponsored genocide

2003 The two remaining regions of the unravelled Yugoslavia unite as a new nation, Serbia and Montenegro

2003 Around the world millions of people march in protest against the war planned by the USA and UK against Iraq

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2003 The US space shuttle Columbia disintegrates, with seven on board, when re- entering the earth's atmosphere

2003 The historic city of Bam, in Iran, is destroyed in a massive earthquake, with more than 40,000 deaths

2003 Michael Rogers, in a team led by Sileshi Semaw, discovers the world's oldest known chipped stone tool, at Gona in Ethiopia

2002 The west end of the Barn Church in Kew is redesigned by Keith Murray to accommodate the Darby Room (named after the vicar, Nicholas Darby), a gallery and ancillary facilities for community use

2002 Mark Edwards builds a working version of a seventeenth-century wooden submarine, by Cornelius Jacobszoon Drebbel, which is rowed underwater in the BBC programme Building the Impossible

2002 Afghan aristocrat and politician Hamid Karzai heads an interim government in his country

2002 In spite of a massive military operation, the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden escapes US pursuit in Afghanistan

2002 All Saints is converted into a private house

2002 Chechen terrorists take hostage the entire audience of a Moscow theatre in an atrocity resulting in the death of more than 150 people

2002 Terrorists detonate bombs in two crowded nightclubs in the Bali resort of Kuta, killing 202 people

2002 The US holds suspected al-Qaeda terrorists indefinitely, and without legal rights, in Guantanamo Bay, an American enclave in Cuba

2002 New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark wins a second term with a landslide victory

2002 The African Union (AU) is established as a successor to the African Economic Community and the Organization of African Unity

2002 Controversial Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn is assassinated outside a a radio station in Hilversum

2002 Fifty years after her accession to the throne, the British queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Golden Jubilee

2002 The US-led invasion of Afghanistan sweeps the Taliban from power, ending their protection of al-Qaeda

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2002 For the Queen's Jubilee Mark Edwards builds an eight-oared royal shallop, Jubilant, a replica of an eighteenth-century original owned by the National Maritime Museum

2002 Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, widow of the British king George VI, dies at the age of 102

2002 In Zimbabwe's presidential election, again characterized by violence and apparent vote-rigging, Mugabe defeats Tsvangirai

2002 The death of Jonas Savimbi is soon followed by the disbanding of UNITA and the end of 27 years of

2002 The trial of Slobodan Milosevic begins at the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague

2001 Dial House becomes the home of the Bishop of Kensington.

2001 UK terrorist Richard Reid tries to bring down a Paris-Miami flight but fails to light the exposive in his shoe

2001 Five presidents succeed each other within a month in Argentina's economic crisis

2001 A month after the fall of Kabul, the Northern Alliance drives the Taliban from their power base in Kandahar

2001 The giant Texas energy company Enron files for bankruptcy after disclosure of major accountancy fraud

2001 The Northern Alliance, the army of the Afghan resistance to the Taliban, drives the Taliban from Kabul

2001 US President George W. Bush revives bitter memories in the Middle East when he describes the war on terrorism as a 'crusade'

2001 Describing September 11 as an act of war, President Bush retaliates with a 'War on Terrorism'

2001 US and UK forces launch military action against Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan

2001 Anthrax attacks, in the form of letters carrying the bacteria posted to journalists and politicians, begin in the USA

2001 Four hijacked planes are used in a massive September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington

2001 Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance, is fatally wounded in an attack by two suicide bombers

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2001 Peter Jackson directs the first of his trilogy of films The Lord of the Rings, based on the cult novel by English academic J.R.R. Tolkien

2001 The former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is handed over to the war crimes tribunal in the Hague

2001 Laurent Kabila, the president of the Congo, is assassinated in a failed coup attempt

2001 Tony Blair leads Britain's Labour party in a second successive election victory, with a majority only marginally reduced from 179 to 167

2001 Crown Prince Dipendra kills nine members of his own royal family at the court of Nepal

2001 Shrek, by DreamWorks Animation, is the first winner of a new Oscar category - Best Animated Feature

2001 Sylvio Berlusconi returns as Italy's prime minister with the electoral success of his right-wing House of Liberties coalition

2001 Kosovo, with its majority Albanian population, formally declares independence from Serbia

2001 Ariel Sharon is elected prime minister of Israel on the platform of taking a tough line with the PLO

2001 An earthquake kills about 20,000 people in the region of Bhuj in the Indian state of Gujarat

2001 The Scottish Court in the Netherlands convicts a Libyan, Al-Megrahi, of responsibility for the Pan-Am Lockerbie bomb

2001 Wikipedia, the 'Free Encyclopedia', is put online by Jimmy Wales as an empty shell which members of the public are invited to fill with content

2000 At the turn of the century, it is calculated that 36 million people worldwide are infected with the HIV virus

2000 The Netherlands becomes the first country to legalize euthanasia, allowing doctors to end the life of a patient suffering 'unbearably' from a terminal condition

2000 The US Supreme Court gives victory to Republican George W. Bush rather than Democrat Al Gore after electoral irregularities in Florida

2000 Vicente Fox wins the presidential election in Mexico (the first time that an opposition politician has done so since 1911)

2000 Aboriginal sprinter Cathy Freeman lights the cauldron to launch the Sydney Olympic

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Games

2000 Alerto Fujimori resigns after a corruption scandal during his third term as president of Peru

2000 Angry crowds drive Slobodan Milosevic from power after he denies defeat in the Serbian election

2000 Hafiz al-Assad dies and is succeeded by his son Bashar as president of Syria

2000 Suicide bombers kill 17 crew members of the destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbour

2000 A visit by Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem sparks off a new intifada

2000 Ang Lee directs Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a martial arts film notable for its magical special effects

2000 The Burmese junta again places Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, a restraint that has continued - with one break - till the present time

2000 inspires German artist Anselm Kiefer's Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

2000 In the election for president of Yugoslavia, the incumbent Slobodan Milosevic is defeated by Vojislav Kostunica

2000 Billy Elliott, directed by Stephen Daldry, tells of a child's journey from a mining community into a new life in

2000 A Concorde supersonic airliner crashes after take-off from Paris, killing all 109 on board

2000 The republic of Ireland is the fastest growing economy in the EU, with a GDP growth of more than 10%

2000 Israel completes the withdrawal of its troops from southern Lebanon

2000 A White House ceremony celebrates a full draft of the human genome completed by two rival projects

2000 In Zimbabwe's elections, marred by intimidation and violence, Mugabe's party wins 62 and Tsvangirai's 57 seats in the assembly

2000 Rap artist Eminem's album The Marshall Mathers LP enters the US charts at no. 1

2000 Kingston Bridge is again widened to include two bicycle lanes, a bus lane and wider pavements

2000 Russell Crowe stars in Ridley Scott's film Gladiator, a revenge drama set in second-

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century Rome

2000 Vladimir Putin wins the presidential election in Russia on the first round

2000 The British Home Secretary, Jack Straw, judges Augusto Pinochet mentally incapable to stand trial and returns him to Chile

2000 The voters in Zimbabwe reject a new constitution enabling the government to acquire land compulsorily without compensation

2000 The new Northern Ireland Assembly is suspended because of IRA failure to decommission arms

2000 Trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai leads a newly formed party in Zimbabwe, the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change)

1999 It is estimated that during this year the population of the world reached six billion

1999 Chromosome 22 becomes the first human genome to be fully sequenced, at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England

1999 The US relinquishes sovereignty over the canal zone to Panama on the last day of the century, as agreed in the 1977 treaty

1999 announces his completely unexpected resignation on New Year's Eve and effectively hands power to Vladimir Putin as acting president

1999 The island of Macau reverts from Portuguese ownership to the People's Republic of China

1999 Floods and massive mudslides in the Vargas state of Venezuela kill an estimated 25,000 people

1999 Britain's hereditary peers lose their rights in the House of Lords, apart from a few elected to serve for an interim period

1999 The UN sends in KFOR (Kosovo Force) to supervise post-war recovery in Kosovo

1999 A Pakistani general, Pervez Musharraf, takes power in a military coup

1999 The UN commits 6000 troops to a peace-keeping role in war-torn Sierra Leone

1999 The TV reality show Big Brother, devised by John de Mol, is broadcast for the first time in the Netherlands

1999 The Russian army returns to Chechnya after Islamic militants commit acts of terrorism

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1999 Sam Mendes directs Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening in American Beauty

1999 Approximately 130,000 Hutus are held in gaol awaiting trial for their part in Rwanda's genocide

1999 Labour leader Helen Clark heads a coalition government as prime minister of New Zealand

1999 An amnesty is declared for some 8000 Muslim terrorists held in Algeria's gaols

1999 A translation by Irish author Seamus Heaney brings many new readers to the Old English poem Beowulf

1999 A peace plan signed in Lusaka brings to an end eleven months of renewed civil war In the Congo

1999 President Kabbah and the guerrilla leader Foday Sankoh arrange for shared government in Sierra Leone

1999 A Scottish parliament resumes business in Edinburgh after an interval of 292 years

1999 Nelson Mandela retires from active politics and is succeeded by Thabo Mbeki as South Africa's president

1999 NATO peacekeepers enter Kosovo after Milosevic agrees to withdraw Serb troops

1999 Ehud Barak becomes prime minister after leading the Labour party to election victory in Israel

1999 A plebiscite in East Timor delivers a vote for independence from Indonesia

1999 Buena Vista Social Club, a nostalgic documentary by Wim Wenders, triggers a cult for Cuban music

1999 UNITA's widespread advance in Angola's long civil war brings terror and starvation

1999 The Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly hold their first elections, both narrowly won by Labour

1999 Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the new president of Algeria, reveals that as many as 100,000 people have died in seven years of civil war and massacre

1999 Two teenage boys in Littleton, Colorado, open fire on their fellow students in Columbine High School, killing twelve and one teacher

1999 Libya hands over, for trial in the Hague, two men suspected of causing the Lockerbie disaster of 1988

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1999 The lawn and gardens surrounding Garrick's Temple are re-landscaped and replanted to replicate something of its appearance in Garrick's day

1999 Aung San Suu Kyi's husband, Michael Aris, dies in England

1999 A fire in the Mont Blanc road tunnel kills 39 people and closes the tunnel for three years

1999 Moderate Shiite cleric Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and two of his sons are assassinated in the Iraqi city of Najaf

1999 President Clinton escapes impeachment when the Senate divides 55-45 and 50-50 on the two charges, well of the required two thirds majority

1999 Marxist guerrillas in Colombia, in partnership with drug cartels, control much of the south of the country

1999 King Hussein of Jordan dies and is succeeded by his son as Abdullah II

1999 The US Senate begins an impeachment trial of President Clinton for perjury and obstruction

1999 Eleven of the nations in the European Union adopt the euro as a shared single currency

1998 The first module is launched of the International Space Station, a cooperative venture by five space agencies (USA, Russia, Japan, Canada, Europe)

1998 Brutal reprisals by Serb troops against Albanians in Kosovo include systematic ethnic cleansing

1998 Steps are taken to end Sudan's fifteen-year civil war, with an undated government promise of a referendum in the south

1998 The European Court of Human Rights replaces a preceding part-time court in Strasbourg

1998 Augusto Pinochet, visiting Britain from Chile for medical treatment, is arrested on an extradition request from a Spanish judge

1998 Civil war begins in Kosovo with a guerrilla campaign by Albanians in the Kosovo Liberation Army

1998 SPD leader Gerhard Schröder replaces as German chancellor, in a coalition with the Green party

1998 John Madden directs Shakespeare in Love, a romantic comedy set in Elizabethan London

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1998 US cruise missiles attack al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical factory in Khartoum

1998 President Clinton admits to having had an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky

1998 The Real IRA kills 26 people and injures about 200 with a bomb planted in Omagh, in northern Ireland

1998 A sudden collapse of the Brazilian follows the earlier slump in the Asian markets

1998 The Taliban recapture Mazar-e-Sharif, giving them control of 90% of Afghanistan

1998 224 deaths in simultaneous attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are linked to al-Qaeda

1998 The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, linking Shikoku and Honshu in Japan, creates a new record as the longest suspension bridge

1998 Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime

1998 Violent gangs, calling themselves the Mugabe War Veterans Association, start to 'liberate' more than 100,000 sq km of white-owned farmland in Zimbabwe

1998 The TV quiz Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, hosted by Chris Tarrant, has its first transmission in the UK

1998 Neighbouring African nations, with an interest in Congo's mineral wealth, take part on both sides in a developing civil war

1998 The Ulster Unionist leader becomes First Minister of the newly convened Northern Ireland Assembly

1998 Bitter and devastating warfare breaks out again between Eritrea and Ethiopia as the result of a border dispute

1998 President Suharto is finally forced to resign, after more than 30 corrupt and embezzling years as Indonesia's dictator

1998 Anthony Gormley's massive metal Angel of the North is erected near Gateshead in northern England

1998 In the referendum to endorse the Good Friday Agreement, the terms are accepted by majorities in both the republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland

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1998 Civil war breaks out again in the Congo, after a Tutsi uprising against Laurent Kabila's government

1998 A UN peacekeeping force takes responsibility for maintaining order in the Central African Republic

1998 A proposed referendum on northern Irish issues is accepted by all the relevant political parties in what becomes known as the Good Friday Agreement

1998 Steven Spielberg directs Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, a World War II drama about a US paratrooper

1998 Garrick's Temple is restored and opens to the public and houses an exhibition on David Garrick's life

1998 The British architectural firm of Foster & Partners completes the Hong Kong International Airport

1998 The drug Viagra wins government approval in the USA as a treatment for male impotence

1998 Two boys aged 11 and 13 fire on a school group in Jonesboro, Arkansas, killing four girls and a teacher

1998 Coastal erosion reveals Seahenge, a 4,000-year-old circle of oak posts in Norfolk

1998 Nigerian forces expel Johnny Koroma from Freetown and reinstate Sierra Leone's elected civilian president, Ahmad Kabbah

1998 President Clinton is emphatic: 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky.'

1997 The Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations is the first international attempt to reduce global warming

1997 The Real IRA, a splinter group of the Provisional IRA, declares its commitment to a continuing campaign of violence

1997 In referenda held by the new Labour government, Scotland votes conclusively for devolution but Wales is lukewarm

1997 Elton John sings a revised version of Candle in the Wind in Westminster Abbey, as a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales

1997 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Ph.D. students at Stanford University, register the domain name google.com

1997 Bob Dylan produces one of his finest albums, Time out of Mind

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1997 Bertie Ahern, leader of Fianna Fáil, becomes the prime minister (Taoiseach) of the republic of Ireland

1997 The British film The Full Monty follows six unemployed steel workers in their transformation into male strippers

1997 Indian author Arundhati Roy publishes her first novel, The God of Small Things

1997 Frank Gehry wins world-wide attention with his design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao

1997 In his first year as a professional, US golfer Tiger Woods wins both the British Open and the US Masters

1997 Mexico's ruling party, the PRI, loses control of the lower house for the first time in nearly seventy years

1997 A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

1997 The poems forming Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters describe his relationship with Plath

1997 Diana, the Princess of Wales, and her friend Dodi Fayed die after a car crash in Paris

1997 The Australian report Bringing Them Home confirms widespread forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their parents

1997 Aung San Suu Kyi's husband is diagnosed in England with cancer, but is refused an entry visa to Burma

1997 The name of Zaire is changed once again, reverting to the Democratic Republic of Congo

1997 Sojourner, a robot roving vehicle, detaches from Mars Pathfinder to analyse the surface of the planet

1997 Irish author Martin McDonagh's play The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the first in a trilogy

1997 Hong Kong reverts to China with the end of Britain's 99-year lease of the New Territories

1997 In Canada's general election the Bloc Québecois lose their position as official opposition to the Liberal government

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1997 Fifteen years after the Falklands War there are 1700 British troops in the islands, guarding 2200 residents

1997 The civilian president of Sierra Leone, Ahmad Kabbah, is ousted in a military coup led by Johnny Koroma

1997 After thirty-two years as the corrupt dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko is driven out by Laurent Kabila

1997 Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss founds his own ballet company at Holstebro

1997 Tony Blair leads the Labour party to its greatest ever electoral victory, winning 418 seats at Westminster

1997 Former US Secretary of State James Baker undertakes the difficult task of trying to find a compromise between the Polisario and Morocco over Western Sahara

1997 Thousands of Shia Muslims are massacred by the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif, in a brief spell before they are driven from the city

1997 Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan is appointed secretary-general of the United Nations, becoming the first black African in the post

1997 dies and is succeeded by Jiang Zemin as China's leader

1997 James Cameron directs Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Wiinslet in the film Titanic, based on the 1912 disaster

1996 Dolly the Sheep is cloned in an epoch-making experiment at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh

1996 Tupac Amaru guerrillas take 460 guests hostage at the Japanese ambassador's Christmas party in Lima, Peru

1996 The guerrilla groups in Guatemala sign a treaty which provides for them to become a recognized political party

1996 Benazir Bhutto is dismissed from government in Pakistan for a second time, again on corruption charges

1996 Bill Clinton wins re-election as US president, defeating Republican candidate Bob Dole

1996 A fatal variant CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease) is first identified in Britain, linked to BSE but capable of infecting humans

1996 Irish author Marina Carr's play Portia Coughlin is performed at the Abbey Theatre

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1996 The Taliban hang ex-president Najibullah and his brother at Kabul's major traffic intersection

1996 The Taliban capture Kabul, driving out rival Afghan guerrilla groups

1996 Anthony Minghella directs The English Patient, a film based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje

1996 Russian troops withdraw from Grozny after a peace deal that leaves Chechnya with effective autonomy

1996 The divorce is finalized of Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales

1996 The British pop group Spice Girls sell millions of their first album, Spice>/I>, breaking all previous UK records

1996 Jerry Rawlings has a convincing electoral victory after seventeen years in power in Ghana

1996 American painter Julian Schnabel turns his hand to film-making with Basquiat, a tribute to graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat

1996 Chris Ofili's painting The Holy Virgin is embellished with elephant dung

1996 In the Wik Decision the Australian High Court gives strong support to Aboriginal land rights

1996 Archbishop Desmond Tutu chairs South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

1996 Benjamin Netanyahu leads the Likud party to victory in an Israeli election overshadowed by Palestinian suicide bombers

1996 The Stone of Scone is returned from Westminster to Scotland, exactly seven centuries after its removal by Edward I

1996 Microsoft founder Bill Gates, with a fortune of $20 billion, is calculated to be the richest man in the world

1996 Expelled from Sudan, Osama bin Laden moves to Afghanistan where he builds training camps for al-Qaeda

1996 Liberal leader John Howard heads the winning coalition in Australia's general election

1996 An IRA bomb at Canary Wharf shatters the fifteen-month ceasefire achieved after the Downing Street Declaration

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1996 Mugabe is elected unopposed for a new six-year term as president

1996 Yasser Arafat is elected president of the new Palestinian National Authority

1995 New West Stand opens at Twickenham rugby ground increasing capacity to 75,000.

1995 An atmospheric probe, released from the US spacecraft Galileo, enters the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter

1995 Mozambique joins the Commonwealth, as the first member not to have emerged from the

1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa, playwright and pro-democracy campaigner in Nigeria, is among a group hanged by the ruling junta

1995 Yitzhak Rabin, after addressing a mass rally for peace in Tel Aviv, is killed by an I sraeli assassin

1995 The US hosts peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia to end the Bosnian civil war

1995 British artist Tracey Emin causes a stir with Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963- 1995

1995 The jury acquits O.J. Simpson of the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, after a trial lasting almost a year

1995 Bryan Singer directs the film The Usual Suspects, an intricate crime drama written by Christopher McQuarrie

1995 US poet Philip Levine wins a Pulitzer Prize with his volume of poems Simple Truth

1995 Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam organizes a Million Man March into Washington

1995 Aung San Suu Kyi is released, and told that she can leave the country but will not be able to return

1995 Bosnian Serbs massacre thousands of Bosnian Muslims after laying siege to the town of Srebrenica

1995 A new extension to the Public Record Office building in Kew is completed. All the PRO’s records are now in one place and Chancery Lane is closed

1995 The restored Privy Garden at Hampton Court is opened following extensive archaeological excavations and meticulous investigation beneath the hugely overgrown predecessor garden, matching in with the newly restored South Front after the fire

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1995 British choreographer Matthew Bourne has a great success with his all-male

1995 Jacques Chirac defeats the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, in the French presidential election

1995 Ethiopians have their first experience of democracy in a free presidential election, won by

1995 A massive bomb destroys federal buildings in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people

1995 British mathematician Andrew Wiles publishes, in Annals of Mathematics, his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

1995 Asian and African UN troops withdraw from Somalia, though the country is still in a state of violent civil war

1995 Britain and Argentina come to an agreement concerning the future exploitation of oil around the Falkland Islands

1995 Sithole is arrested, on a charge of plotting to assassinate Mugabe, in a move widely seen as a way of keeping him out of the 1996 presidential election

1994 Russian troops enter Chechnya to crush the armed separatist movement

1994 Potholers discover the world's oldest known paintings in the Chauvet cave in southern France

1994 The collapse of Sylvio Berlusconi's coaltion brings to an end his short-lived first period as Italy's prime minister

1994 A devaluation of the Mexican peso leads to a sudden collapse in the local stock market

1994 Riverdance, based on traditional Irish step dancing, is presented first as an entertainment in the Eurovision Song Contest

1994 German racing driver Michael Schumacher wins his first world championship title in Formula One

1994 Art, a play by French-born Iranian playwright Yasmina Reza, has its premiere in Berlin

1994 After 18 years in the USA, living in Vermont, Alexander Solzhenitsyn returns to post- Communist Russia

1994 More than a million Hutus, escaping from the backlash after the genocide in Rwanda, are in refugee camps in Zaire

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1994 The Stables Gallery is opened in the stables of Orleans House

1994 The Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Hussein, the king of Jordan, sign a historic peace agreement

1994 Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin share the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to solve the Israel-Palestine problem

1994 Mike Newell directs the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, starring Hugh Grant

1994 Divorce is legalized in the republic of Ireland

1994 Two leading members of Mexico's ruling party, Luis Donaldo Colosio and José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, are assassinated

1994 Quentin Tarantino directs John Travolta and Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction

1994 The fossilized skeleton of an Ardipithecus female, nicknamed Ardi and 4.4 million years old, is found in the Awash valley region of Ethiopia

1994 The return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti, under UN protection, leads to a period of relative calm unusual in the republic

1994 The IRA declares a cease-fire in Northern Ireland, a gesture followed a month later by Protestant paramilitaries

1994 North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung dies and is succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Il

1994 Tony Blair wins the leadership of the Labour party, and sets about establishing what he calls New Labour

1994 After the genocide in Rwanda, the Rwandan Patriotic Front captures Kigali and replaces the Hutu government

1994 Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian- occupied Cephalonia

1994 President Clinton's bill to provide health insurance for all US citizens is defeated in Congress

1994 Italian architect Renzo Piano completes Kansai airport, on an artificial island in Osaka bay

1994 Trinidadian cricketer Brian Lara sets a new world record, scoring 501 not out when playing for Warwickshire against Durham

1994 With ended, South Africa rejoins the Commonwealth of Nations

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1994 Mogadishu, the capital, is divided between two factions in Somalia's civil war

1994 In his apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis John Paul II forbids even any discussion of the ordination of women

1994 The Italian film Il Postino brings poetry into the life of a postman who delivers mail to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda

1994 France's President Mitterrand and the British queen Elizabeth II together open the tunnel under the English Channel

1994 The New Zealand government pays compensation to the Waikato tribe in the first of several settlements for land illegally seized

1994 Israel recognizes the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative body of the Palestinian people

1994 Hastings Banda, president since independence in 1964, is defeated in Malawi's first multiparty elections

1994 Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna dies when the steering column of his car shears during the San Marino Grand Prix

1994 Nelson Mandela is sworn in as the first president of the new democratic South Africa

1994 South Africa's first non-racial election is won by the ANC with 63% of the vote

1994 A new constitution in South Africa guarantees equal rights to all citizens

1994 Tom Hanks stars in Forrest Gump, based on a novel by Winston Groom

1994 As many as 800,000 people die, most of them slashed to death with machetes, in three months of genocide in Rwanda

1994 The assassination of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana sparks the outbreak of genocide

1994 Cyprian Ntayamira, the second Hutu president of Burundi, dies in the crash of the president of Rwanda's plane

1994 The Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, dies when his plane is shot down

1994 US and European troops are withdrawn from the UN force in turbulent Somalia

1994 Sylvio Berlusconi's new party, Forza Italia, wins enough votes for him to head a coalition as prime minister

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1994 Former prime minister Bettino Craxi leaves Italy to escape a gaol sentence for corruption

1994 Mullah Mohammed Omar, in Kandahar, forms a group devoted to fundamentalist Islam and calls it Taliban (meaning students of the Qur'an)

1994 The Hutu government in Rwanda preaches genocide against Tutsis

1994 Mayan Indians in Chiapas rebel in an armed uprising against the Mexican government

1993 New East Stand opens at Twickenham rugby ground.

1993 Media magnate Silvio Berlusconi founds Forza Italia as a new centre-right political party in Italy

1993 UK and Irish premiers and Albert Reynolds sign the Downing Street Declaration, a strategy for peace in Nothern Ireland

1993 Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their partnership in South Africa

1993 Chen Kaige directs Farewell My Concubine, depicting the devastating effect of the Cultural Revolution on some performers of Peking

1993 The separatist Bloc Québecois becomes (until losing seats in the next election) the official Opposition in the Canadian parliament

1993 Loyal troops storm the parliament in Moscow, ending a putsch against President Yeltsin

1993 Liberal leader Jean Chrétien begins a 10-year spell as Canadian prime minister

1993 After only three years in opposition, Benazir Bhutto wins a second term as prime minister of Pakistan

1993 Civil war in Burundi, between Hutus and Tutsis, follows the murder of the first Hutu president

1993 Melchior Ndadaye, the first Hutu president of Burundi, is killed by Tutsis within months of his election

1993 Steven Spielberg directs a film of Thomas Keneally's novel Schindler's Ark, giving it the title Schindler's List

1993 Meeting in Washington, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat accept the Oslo Accords, promising autonomy for Palestine within five years

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1993 President Habyarimana alienates Rwanda's Hutu Power extremists by coming to terms with the Rwandan Patriotic Front

1993 Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (House) is a concrete cast of the interior of a house in London's East End

1993 The Oslo Accords, brokered by the Norwegian government between the PLO and Israel, are seen as a breakthrough in the Middle East crisis

1993 Work begins on China's ambitiious and controversial Three Gorges Dam project

1993 Irish author Roddy Doyle publishes a novel that wins the Booker Prize, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

1993 Scottish author Irvine Welsh publishes his first novel, Trainspotting

1993 Eduardo Paolozzi's vast bronze sculpture The Wealth of Nations is installed at South Kyle, near Edinburgh

1993 The new federalist regime in Ethiopia cedes independence to Eritrea

1993 Vikram Seth publishes his novel A Suitable Boy, a family saga in post-independence India

1993 US tennis player Pete Sampras wins the first of his record-breaking seven Wimbledon singles titles

1993 US architect Ieoh Ming Pei completes his underground extension of the Louvre, surmounted by a glass pyramid

1993 Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, is premiered in London

1993 US author Annie Proulx wins major awards with her second novel, The Shipping News

1993 The UN imposes sanctions because of Libya's refusal to cooperate in the Lockerbie air disaster enquiry

1993 US author A.R. Ammons publishes a book-length poem, Garbage, typed on narrow strips of adding-machine paper

1993 Guinea's first democratic election is won by the incumbent president, Lansana Conté

1993 The Branch Dravidians, members of a religious cult, burn to death in their Waco headquarters under siege by the FBI

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1993 English novelist Sebastian Faulks publishes Birdsong, set partly in the trenches of World War I

1993 Apartheid ends in South Africa, after two thirds of white voters vote for its abolition in a referendum

1993 Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin drugs cartel in Colombia, is cornered and shot

1993 Steven Spielberg directs Jurassic Park, in which dinosaurs are cloned (and animated) to terrifying effect

1993 Czechoslovakia divides peacefully into the Czech and Slovak Republics

1992 Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales, announce that they have agreed to separate

1992 The UN sends troops to famine-stricken and war-torn Somalia

1992 Democrat Bill Clinton beats incumbent George Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot in a three-cornered US presidential election

1992 UNITA revives the Angolan civil war after the MPLA wins a decisive election victory

1992 Albanians in Kosovo proclaim independence, prompting increased Serb oppression

1992 Mark Edwards re-establishes traditional boatbuilding at the Richmond Bridge boathouses., next door to Stan Peasley, the last of the traditional watermen/boathirers

1992 English poet Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats deals openly with AIDS

1992 All the Pretty Horses is the first volume of US author Cormac McCarthy's trilogy set in Mexico

1992 The Mabo Case in Australia establishes Aboriginal common law land rights

1992 The mujaheddin, after removing from power the Soviet-backed president Najibullah, proclaim an Islamic state

1992 Mohammad Najibullah, Russia's puppet ruler in Afghanistan, is finally overwhelmed in Kabul by the mujaheddin

1992 US screenwriter Quentin Tarantino makes his debut as a director with Reservoir Dogs

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1992 Manuel Noriega, ex-president of Panama, is convicted in a US court of drug trafficking

1992 Betty Boothroyd, a Labour MP, becomes the first woman Speaker of Britain's House of Commons

1992 David Mamet's play Oleanna dramatizes the ambiguities of sexual politics

1992 Eric Clapton's album Unplugged includes 'Tears in Heaven', mourning the death of his four-year-old son

1992 After a single term as president of the , Corazon Aquino returns to private life

1992 The New York company Dance Theatre of Harlem tours South Africa, with the slogan 'Dancing Through Barriers'

1992 Slobodan Milosevic is elected president of Yugoslavia (by now only Serbia and Montenegro)

1992 Yitzhak Rabin returns as prime minister of Israel after the Labour party wins a general election

1992 US-born Canadian author Carol Shields' novel The Republic of Love is set in her home town of Winnipeg

1992 A Land Acquisition Act enables Mugabe to purchase land compulsorily, abandoning the 'willing buyer, willing seller' principle agreed at Lancaster House

1992 Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic encourages ethnic cleansing by paramilitaries in Bosnia

1992 Riots follow the acquittal of four Los Angeles policemen charged with assaulting the African American Rodney King

1992 resigns as Burma's dictator and is replaced by (who still heads the junta some 20 years later)

1992 Fighting intensifies between Serbs and Croats, and Muslims, for territory within Bosnia-Herzegovina

1992 After years of restoration and re-interpretation the King's State Apartments at Hampton Court reopen in July 1992

1992 US author Jane Smiley retells the Lear story in A Thousand Acres

1992 Algeria is plunged into a brutal civil war between a and Muslim terrorists

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1991 resigns as president of the defunct USSR, handing power to Boris Yeltsin as president of the new Russian republic

1991 Kurds in northern Iraq achieves a measure of autonomy in a safe haven imposed by the UN

1991 Eight more Soviet Socialist republics vote to join the three founder members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

1991 Paul Keating becomes prime minister of Australia after a Labor party leadership contest against Bob Hawke

1991 A treaty signed in the Netherlands town of Maastricht establishes the European Union and prepares for the introduction of the euro

1991 Three Soviet republics (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus) declare independence, leading to the formal disbanding of the USSR

1991 A new party, the Islamic Salvation Front, seems certain to win the Algerian election – until the army intervenes

1991 Gong plays a concubine of a Chinese warlord in Raise the Red Lantern, directed by Zhang Yimou

1991 The Soviet region of Chechnya proclaims its independence from the USSR, calling itself the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria

1991 Multiparty elections in Zambia result in a massive defeat for the long-serving president, Kenneth Kaunda

1991 The US spacecraft Galileo provides scientists with close-up photographs of two asteroids, Gaspra and Ida

1991 Armenia delcares its independence from the USSR, 70 years after it was annexed

1991 Aung San Suu Kyi wins the Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous fight for democracy in Burma

1991 The parliament in Bosnia-Herzegovina votes to secede from the crumbling Yugoslavia

1991 The Revolutionary United Front, led by Foday Sankoh, attacks Sierra Leone from bases in Liberia

1991 A military coup in Haiti ousts the reforming president Jean-Bertrand Aristide

1991 A man found frozen high in the Alps turns out to be a neolithic hunter from about

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5000 years ago

1991 Regeneration is the first volume of English author Pat Barker's trilogy of novels set during World War I

1991 Civil war in Somalia topples the Marxist dictator Mohamed

1991 Macedonia follows the example of Slovenia and Croatia in proclaiming its independence from Yugoslavia

1991 Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins star in the film The Silence of the Lambs

1991 US sculptor Jeff Koons marries one of his favourite subjects, Italian porn star La Cicciolina

1991 Boris Yeltsin foils a hard-line Communist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, on holiday at the time in the Crimea

1991 Hutu youth militias, known as the Interahamwe, are formed in Rwanda to spearhead attacks on Tutsis

1991 Tim Berners-Lee, using CERN computers, puts online the first website at http://info.cern.ch

1991 Canadian poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje publishes The English Patient

1991 Morocco and the Polisario end hostilities on the understanding that there will be a referendum in the Western Sahara

1991 Carl Lewis beats his own previous 100- world record, winning gold at the World Championships in Tokyo

1991 The US rock group Nirvana become the leading performers of grunge

1991 The break-up of Yugoslavia begins with a joint declaration of independence by two of its regions, Slovenia and Croatia

1991 Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III is performed at the National Theatre in London

1991 Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III is performed at the National Theatre in London

1991 Former Communist Boris Yeltsin is elected leader of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic

1991 Another cease-fire in Angola's bitter civil war brings another brief period of peace

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1991 The rebel Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), led by Meles Zenawi, takes control in Ethiopia

1991 As Ethiopian and Eritrean rebels approach Addis Ababa, the leader of the Dergue, Mengistu, flees the country

1991 Rajiv Gandhi is killed near Chennai, during an election campaign, by a suicide bomber on behalf of Tamil militants

1991 The incumbent president, Mathieu Kérékou, loses in Benin's first democratic election

1991 A Tuareg uprising in Mali results in some 120,000 refugees fleeing the country

1991 With all Iraqi troops expelled from Kuwait by Allied tanks, President Bush declares a ceasefire in the

1991 Expelled from his own country, Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden moves to Sudan where he continues to develop al-Qaeda

1991 The Gulf War begins when Iraq fails to meet the UN deadline for withdrawal from Kuwait

1990 New North Stand opens at Twickenham rugby ground.

1990 Solidarnośc leader Lech Walesa wins Poland's first free presidential election

1990s The old marshalling yards of Kew Gardens station are turned into a housing estate

1990 John Major is elected leader of the Conservative party and succeeds Thatcher as UK prime minister

1990 Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew steps down after 31 years in office

1990 The Piano Lesson is the second of August Wilson's plays to win a Pulitzer Prize

1990 Russian dancer Irek Mukhamedov leaves the Bolshoi company to join in London

1990 Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Geneva, publishes the first formal proposal for the World Wide Web

1990 West Indian author Derek Walcott publishes Omeros, an epic poem of the Caribbean

1990 An army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front crosses the border from Uganda to invade Rwanda

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1990 The Sadler's Wells ballet company moves to Birmingham, to become the Birmingham Royal Ballet

1990 Irish author Brian Friel's play Dancing at Lughnasa has its premiere at the Abbey Theatre

1990 East and West Germany are united in a new Federal Republic of Germany

1990 Julia Roberts and Richard Gere star in Pretty Woman, directed by Garry Marshall

1990 Mary Robinson is elected president of the republic of Ireland, the first woman to hold the post

1990 Saddam Hussein announces the annexation of Kuwait, claiming it to have been historically part of Iraq

1990 Benazir Bhutto's government is dismissed on corruption charges and her party loses the resulting elections

1990 Iraqi troops cross the border into Kuwait and are soon in control of the whole country and its oil wells

1990 UK prime minister , by now at odds with many in her cabinet, is challenged in a leadership contest and loses

1990 Boris Yeltsin, impatient with the pace of reform under Gorbachev, resigns from the Communist party

1990 The Palm House officially reopens, after being completely refurbished between 1952 and 1959; then taken down and rebuilt between 1985 and 1988, followed by the return of the plants.

1990 Three tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras) sing at a concert in Rome to celebrate the World Cup

1990 and Mark Morris establish the White Oak Dance Project as a touring company

1990 Gérard Depardieu plays the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac, based on the play by Edmond Rostand

1990 Alberto Fujimori and his newly formed Cambio 90 party win a surprise election victory in Peru

1990 The Conservative government's poll tax is greeted with violent riots in London and a campaign of non-payment

1990 Namibia becomes independent with Sam Nujoma as president

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1990 A Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is elected president of Haiti and begins a programme of reform

1990 Aung San Ssu Kyi remains under house arrest, and is not released till 1995

1990 Aung San Suu Kyi's party wins an overwhelming victory in Burma's general election but the military refuse to hand over power

1990 The aged president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, wins the Ivory Coast's first democratic elections

1990 Danish choreographer Peter Martins becomes director of the Ballet

1990 The Hubble Space Telescope is launched from a space shuttle and goes into orbit 370 miles (600 km) above the earth

1990 British primatologist Jane Goodall publishes Through a Window, exposing violence and brutality in chimpanzees

1990 Racing Demon launches a trilogy on the British establishment by English playwright David Hare

1990 Nelson Mandela is given an ecstatic reception on his release after twenty-six years in prison on Robben Island, near Cape Town

1990 The Sandinistas lose the Nicaraguan presidential election, with Daniel Ortega beaten into second place by Violeta Chamorro

1990 South African president F.W. de Klerk announces his radical intention to end apartheid

1990 Panama's dictator, Manuel Noriega, is captured by US troops and taken to Miami on drug trafficking charges

1989 Alexander Dubcek is Speaker of Parliament and Václav Havel is President in the new democratic government of Czechoslovakia

1989 Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife are captured and executed in a Romanian uprising

1989 President Bush sends 24,000 US troops to occupy Panama City and seize Manuel Noriega

1989 Kenneth MacMillan gives 20-year-old Darcy Bussell the leading role in his new full- length ballet, The Prince of the Pagodas

1989 With the fall of Pinochet, Chile returns eagerly to democracy - electing a Christian Democrat, Patricio Aylwin, as president

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1989 The Communist party relinquishes power without bloodshed in Czechoslovakia's

1989 French ballerina moves from Paris to join the Royal Ballet in London

1989 British prime minister Margaret Thatcher introduces an extremely unpopluar poll tax, last used in the Middle Ages

1989 Citizens of East Berlin demolish the , in what proves a symbolic end to the

1989 , leader of East Germany since 1971, is forced to resign after massive popular demonstrations

1989 At CERN, in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau build ENQUIRE, a first step towards the future World Wide Web

1989 The US unmanned spacecraft Galileo is launched from a space shuttle on a six- year voyage to Jupiter

1989 Frederik Willem de Klerk, promising reform, wins a whites-only South African presidential election

1989 James Ivory directs the film The Remains of the Day, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

1989 Before the coming election the military junta in Burma places democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest

1989 The English National Ballet evolves from London's Festival Ballet

1989 Elections in Poland bring Solidarnośc nation-wide success, and the party is soon at the head of a coalition government

1989 Slobodan Milosevic is elected president of Serbia

1989 US sculptor Richard Serra's Tilted Arc is removed from Federal Plaza, New York, after legal action by local protesters

1989 More than 2000 peaceful demonstrators die after troops open fire in Beijing's Tiananmen Square

1989 Ayatollah Khomeini dies and is succeeded by Sayed Ali Khamenei as Iran's leading ayatollah

1989 Uruguay enjoys the first entirely free election since the years of military dictatorship

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1989 Confronted with mass popular protest, Deng Xiaoping imposes in China

1989 The crowd demonstrating on Beijing's Tiananmen Square swells to more than a million

1989 Students, teachers and workers gather in large numbers in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to demand democratic reform

1989 Carlos Menem is elected president of Argentina and introduces a free market economy

1989 April 15 in the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield 96 Liverpool fans are crushed to death during a match against Nottingham Forest

1989 Rupert Murdoch launches Sky, a satellite television channel, in the UK

1989 The supertanker Exxon Valdez spills vast quantities of oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska

1989 The USSR completes the phased withdrawal of its troops from Aghanistan

1989 Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner is toppled by Andrés Rodríguez, who restores democracy to the country

1988 A terrorist bomb brings down flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland

1988 35-year-old Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the executed president, leads a coalition government in Pakistan

1988 M. Butterfly, by US author and composer David Henry Hwang, uses Puccini's opera as its inspiration

1988 Republican George Bush ('read my lips, no new taxes') wins the US presidential election

1988 Australian author Peter Carey's novel Oscar and Lucinda wins the Booker Prize

1988 English conceptual artist Damien Hirst organizes the first exhibition of the 'Young British Artists', also known as the Britpack

1988 Augusto Pinochet, the only candidate in Chile's presidential election, resigns when he wins less than half the votes cast

1988 English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage's first opera, Greek, is premiered in Munich

1988 Nine Roman Catholic cardinals attend the 1000th anniversary celebrations of the Russian people being brought into the Orthodox faith

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1988 A new party, the National League for Democracy, is formed in Burma with Aung San Suu Kyi soon becoming its leader

1988 Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna wins the first of his three Formula One titles

1988 Saw Maung calls his new regime the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) but promises to hold a free election in 1990

1988 General Saw Maung seizes power in Burma and crushes the , by now nation-wide, with probably about 3000 deaths

1988 Bernardo Bertolucci directs The Last Emperor, a film based on the life of Puyi, the last in China's imperial line

1988 Aung San Suu Kyi returns to Burma from England, to look after her dying mother

1988 Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein uses chemical weapons against the Kurds of northern Iraq

1988 The Iran-Iraq war ends with the border between the countries unchanged and more than a million dead

1988 Leading New York Graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat dies of an overdose

1988 Students demonstrating in Rangoon are joined by civilians and monks in what becomes known as the 8888 Uprising (from the date, 8/8/88)

1988 Osama bin Laden's involvement in the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan leads to his development of al-Qaeda

1988 US architect Frank Gehry builds a strikingly unconventional house for his family in Santa Monica

1988 Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, declares that the organization renounces 'terrorism in all its forms'

1988 A woman is consecrated as Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts, becoming the first female bishop in the Anglican Communion's historic line of succession from St Peter

1988 US athlete Carl Lewis sets a new world record for the 100 , winning gold at the Seoul Olympics

1988 The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev announces that Soviet troops will leave Afghanistan, handing victory to the mujaheddin

1988 Britain stops funding Zimbabwe's purchase of land for redistribution, on the grounds that many of the farms are being given to the political elite

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1988 The 'new and permanent' Parliament House of Australia is completed in Canberra

1988 British physicist Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos for the general reader in A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes

1988 A cease-fire withdraws Cuban troops from Angola and South African forces from Angola and Namibia

1988 The Liberals and the SDP merge in Britain to form a single political party, the Liberal Democrats

1988 A protest against the new Burmese currency escalates after the military kill a student activist, Maung Phone Maw, on the campus of Rangoon university

1988 Barry Levinson directs Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in the film Rain Man

1988 Ayatollah Khomeini declares a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses

1987 It is estimated that during this year the population of the world reached five billion

1987 Hamas (acronym in Arabic for 'Movement for Islamic Resistance') is founded in the occupied territories to lead armed resistance against Israel

1987 An Intifada begins against Israeli occupation of Palestinian land

1987 Robert Hughes describes the penal system of colonial Australia in The Fatal Shore

1987 John Adams' opera Nixon in China is performed in Houston

1987 The Dow-Jones index loses 30% in a dramatic US stock-market collapse

1987 US author Tom Wolfe gives a bleak view of contemporary New York in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities

1987 The film Cry Freedom, directed by Richard Attenborough, tells the story of Steve Biko, killed in police custody in South Africa

1987 British golfer Nick Faldo wins the first of three victories in six years in the British Open

1987 US architect Daniel Libeskind designs the City Edge project in Berlin, building it up from startlingly fragmented forms

1987 Designed by Gordon Wilson, and replacing 26 individual glasshouses, the Princess of Wales Conservatory is opened by Diana, Princess of Wales.

1987 Most of the currency in circulation in Burma becomes worthless when

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replaces it with new 45 and 90 kyat notes (he says 9 is is his lucky number)

1987 US author Toni Morrison publishes her novel Beloved, loosely based on a real incident among freed slaves after the Civil War

1987 Sylvie Guillem and Laurent Hilaire dance in the Paris premiere of William Forsythe's In the middle somewhat elevated

1987 Timberlake Wertenbaker bases her play Our Country's Good on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker

1987 The US Congress begins an investigation of the Iran-Contra affair, eventually clearing President Reagan of direct involvement

1987 Talking Heads, a series of dramatic monologues by English author Alan Bennett, is broadcast on British TV

1987 18-year-old German tennis player Steffi Graf deposes Martina Navratilova as world no. 1

1987 English poets John Fuller and James Fenton collaborate in a volume of satirical poems, Partingtime Hall

1987 The Zimbabwean constitution is changed to make Mugabe executive president (with Nkomo vice-president, until his death in 1999)

1987 Mugabe and Nkomo merge their two parties as ZANU-PF, making Zimbabwe effectively a one-party state

1986 Pope's Villa becomes St James Independent School for Boys.

1986 The Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill becomes the first rap (or hip hop) album to top the US chart

1986 dies and is buried in the churchyard of St Giles in Horsted Keynes

1986 Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki's opera The Black Mask is premiered in Salzburg

1986 Details of the Iran-Contra affair spark a Washington scandal and the criminal prosecution of Oliver North

1986 Mad Cow Disease (BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy ) is identified and described in Britain

1986 Yves Montand and Gérard Depardieu star in Jean De Florette, adapted from a novel by Marcel Pagnol

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1986 20-year-old US boxer Mike Tyson knocks out Trevor Berbick to become the youngest ever world heavyweight champion

1986 Argentina wins the World Cup quarter final against England with help from Maradona and 'the hand of God'

1986 Desmond Tutu is the first black African to be archbishop of Cape Town

1986 Nikolai Tolstoy publishes The Minister and the Massacres, charging Harold Macmillan with responsibility for the 'victims of Yalta'

1986 Harrison Birtwistle's second opera, The Mask of Orpheus, brings him an international reputation

1986 The Rwandan Patriotic Front is formed, by a group of exiles, to bring about the downfall of Habyarimana's regime in Rwanda

1986 A Soviet nuclear power station explodes at Chernobyl, scattering radioactive material over a wide area

1986 Western nations finally impose sanctions on South Africa in response to apartheid

1986 Tony Cragg's Raleigh is unveiled outside the Tate Gallery in his home town of Liverpool

1986 President Reagan launches an air strike against Libya, accusing Gaddafi of involvement in international terrorism

1986 A terrible fire destroys much of the King's State Appartments, third floor and roof of the South Front of Hampton Court

1986 The drug AZT (azidothymidine) offers hope as a way of inhibiting the progression from HIV to AIDS

1986 Simultaneous acts passed in Canberra and Westminster give Australia full judicial independence, ending appeals to the UK Privy Council

1986 Swedish prime minister Olof Palme is killed in a Stockholm street in an unsolved murder

1986 After attempting to rig the presidential election to defeat Corazón Aquino, Ferdinand Marcos flees from the Philippines to exile in Hawaii

1986 The Soviets launch the first module (the living quarters) of their Mir Space Station

1986 The Marble Hill estate transfers to English Heritage

1986 Corazón Aquino, widow of the assassinated Benigno Aquino, stands against

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Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines presidential election

1986 Baby Doc Duvalier escapes from Haiti in a US airforce jet and goes into exile in France

1986 The guerrilla leader Yoweri Museveni takes Kampala and becomes president of Uganda

1986 The US Space shuttle Challenger explodes with seven on board less than two minutes after lift-off

1985 British Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah publishes his second collection as The Dread Affair

1985 Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Ireland's Garret FitzGerald sign an Anglo-Irish Agreement to tackle shared problems

1985 22-year-old Gary Kasparov defeats Anatoly Karpov and becomes the youngest-ever world champion in chess

1985 In a speech to the Tory Reform Group, Harold Macmillan describes Mrs Thatcher's privatization policy as 'selling the family silver'

1985 Julius Nyerere, long-serving president of Tanzania, relinquishes power voluntarily

1985 The Human Genome Project begins in the US Department of Energy, with the aim of sequencing the whole of human DNA

1985 Ayers Rock is returned to the Mutitjulu people and given its Aboriginal name, Uluru

1985 French racing driver Alain Prost wins the first of his four Formula One titles

1985 Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid publishes her first novel, Annie John

1985 Seven groups of Afghan mujaheddin form a united front against the Soviet army

1985 Milton Obote, toppled in a bloodless Uganda coup, escapes to Zambia

1985 The first Oprah Winfrey Show is broadcast in the USA, beginning a very long open- ended series

1985 US artist Christo tightly binds Paris's Pont Neuf in fabric, as one of his international series of wrapped iconic buildings

1985 Live Aid, an all-day concert for famine relief in Africa, is held simultaneously in London and

1985 French agents blow up Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour

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1985 Gabriel García Márquez publishes Love in a Time of Cholera, a novel about love rekindled after five decades

1985 17-year-old German tennis-player Boris Becker becomes the youngest ever to win the men's singles at Wimbledon

1985 Oliver North arranges for clandestine money from Iran to provide illegal support for the Nicaraguan Contras

1985 US author Don DeLillo publishes a novel of weird disasters, White Noise

1985 President Reagan's administration breaks a US embargo with secret arms sales to Iran in return for assistance in the release of US hostages in Lebanon

1985 A dormant volcano erupts in Colombia, burying some 20,000 victims under a deep layer of silt

1985 Peter Carey publishes Illywhacker, a novel narrated by a 139-year-old Australian

1985 With the return of democracy to Bolivia, the 77-year-old Paz Estenssoro is once again elected president

1985 New Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev brings ('openness') and ('reform') to the USSR

1985 The miners' strike, ending after eleven bitter months, proves a turning point in the struggle between Margaret Thatcher and the unions

1985 Civilian rule is restored in Brazil after Tancredo Neves and Jose Sarney are elected president and vice-president

1984 More than 2000 die in the Indian city of Bhopal when toxic gas escapes from a Union Carbide plant

1984 Desmond Tutu, rector of an Anglican church in Soweto, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

1984 Bob Geldof forms Band Aid and releases for Ethiopian famine relief the best-selling UK single Do they know its Christmas?

1984 is elected for a second presidential term, defeating the Democrat Walter Mondale

1984 US choreographer William Forsythe becomes director of the Ballet

1984 The opera Akhnaten, by US composer Philip Glass, has its first performance in Stuttgart

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1984 Madonna (Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone) releases her second album, Like a Virgin, that goes on to sell millions

1984 Rajiv Gandhi succeeds his mother as leader of the Congress party and prime minister of India

1984 Ian Botham is the first player to achieve the double triple, with a total of more than 3000 runs and 300 wickets in Test cricket

1984 Indira Gandhi is assassinated in Delhi by members of her Sikh bodyguard, in retaliation for the desecration of the Golden Temple

1984 Australian bowler Dennis Lillee's total of 351 Test wickets sets a new record

1984 Luciano Berio's opera Un re in ascolto has its premiere in Salzburg

1984 Genetic (or DNA) fingerprinting is invented and developed by British geneticist Alec Jeffreys

1984 wins a decisive electoral victory over the Liberals to become prime minister of Canada

1984 Roland Joffé directs The Killing Fields, set among the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia

1984 The Turkana Boy, the most complete known skeleton of Homo erectus, is found near Lake Turkana by Kamoya Kimeu in Richard Leakey's team

1984 A disastrous famine in the northern provinces of Ethiopia is the first to be seen all round the world on television

1984 US sprinter and long-jumper Carl Lewis wins four gold medals at the Los Angeles Olympics

1984 The CIA covertly arranges for mines to be laid in Nicaragua's harbours

1984 Republican activist Gerry Adams is elected president of Sinn Fein

1984 British architects James Stirling and Michael Wilford complete a new art gallery for Stuttgart

1984 David Lange becomes prime minister of New Zealand after a Labour election victory

1984 English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot

1984 Diego Maradona is sold to Napoli for a new record fee of about £5 million, two years

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after being sold to Barcelona for £3 million

1984 Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi uses the army to dislodge militant Sikhs occupying the Golden Temple in Amritsar

1984 English athlete Daley Thompson sets an Olympic and world record in the decathlon at the Los Angeles Olympics

1984 Sikh rebels, demanding an independent Punjab, seize the Golden Temple in Amritsar

1984 Drugs barons in Colombia murder the Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, to protect their trade

1984 Czech novelist Milan Kundera publishes The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in the tradition of magic realism

1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the title role, that of an almost silent killing machine, in The Terminator

1984 New additions to St Mary's are completed, designed by Edward Cullinan, to replace the parts destroyed by the fire of 1978

1984 The name of Upper Volta is changed to Burkina Faso, meaning 'land of incorruptible people'

1984 US poet Robert Pinsky publishes an acclaimed verse translation, The Inferno of Dante

1984 British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and union leader Arthur Scargill begin a bitter personal struggle in the miners' strike

1984 Milos Forman directs the screen version of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus

1984 British skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean earn a perfect score for their Bolero programme in the Sarajevo winter Olympics

1984 On his 90th birthday Harold Macmillan is given Britain's last hereditary peerage, as Earl of Stockton

1983 Luc Montagnier, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, discovers a new human retrovirus that he names LAV (later changed to HIV)

1983 Olivier Messiaen's opera St Francis of Assisi has its premiere in Paris

1983 President Reagan sends US marines to Grenada after the execution of the island's prime minister, Maurice Bishop

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1983 Polish union leader and activist Lech Walesa is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

1983 Government imposition of Islamic law (sharia) triggers renewed civil war in Sudan between the Muslim north and Christian south

1983 begins a successful 6-year period as artistic director of the

1983 Classical ballerina triumphs on Broadway in On Your Toes

1983 The Tamil Tigers launch a civil war against the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka

1983 Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino is assassinated at Manila International Airport

1983 A new version of the Apple adds the mouse to personal computers

1983 South African novelist J.M. Coetzee publishes The Life and Times of Michael K, and wins the Booker Prize

1983 Manuel Noriega wins control of the National Guard in Panama on his way to achieving absolute power

1983 and Sony jointly introduce a new device, the compact disc

1983 The US system MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) becomes the industry standard for electronic communication in music

1983 Philip Johnson completes the A.T. & T. skyscraper in New York, an early example of Post-Modernism

1983 A civilian government, voted into power in Argentina, prosecutes members of the military junta for civil rights abuses

1983 The first all-digital synthesizer, the DX7, is put on the market by Yamaha

1983 President Reagan proposes a Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) against nuclear attack

1983 Ronald Harwood's play The Dresser is partly inspired by the British actor Donald Wolfit

1983 Bob Hawke is Australia's prime minister after a Labor victory in the election

1983 British economist Nicholas Kaldor attacks monetarism in The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher

1982 Michael Jackson's releases the album Thriller, which goes on to sell 40 million

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copies in ten years

1982 After 18 years as General Secretary of the Communist party in the USSR, Leonid Brezhnev dies in office

1982 Hezbollah emerges in Lebanon as an Iranian-sponsored against the Israeli occupation of the southern part of the country

1982 George Segal's bronze monument The Holocaust is unveiled in San Francisco

1982 The trade union movement Solidarnośc () is declared illegal by the Polish government

1982 CDU leader Helmut Kohl follows Helmut Schmidt as chancellor of Germany

1982 Leaders of Canada's Aboriginal peoples form the Assembly of First Nations (AFN)

1982 Christian militiamen massacre Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Lebanon

1982 US fillm actress Grace Kelly is killed in a car accident in Monte Carlo

1982 British director Richard Attenborough creates an epic film, Gandhi, from the life of the pacifist Indian leader

1982 British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, promoter of the punk style, shows a collection called Punkature

1982 8,000-year-old human remains are found in a waterlogged burial site at Windover, in Florida

1982 Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona is sold to Barcelona for a new record fee of about £3 million, almost double the highest previous figure

1982 Yasser Arafat and the PLO move to Tunisia, after being driven out of Lebanon by Israel

1982 Australian novelist Thomas Keneally publishes Schindler's Ark and wins the Booker Prize

1982 Local volunteers take over regular filling of Kew Pond from Richmond Council so that constant water level can be maintained

1982 The leader of the Argentinian junta, Leopoldo Galtieri, resigns three days after the Falklands defeat

1982 British troops recapture Port Stanley, after which the Argentinian forces in the Falklands surrender

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1982 Israeli Minister of Defence Ariel Sharon heads Israel's invasion of Lebanon to expel the PLO

1982 Senegal and the Gambia partially merge as Senegambia, in a confederation which l asts seven years

1982 Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church (or 'Moonies'), is convicted in the USA of tax fraud and imprisoned

1982 Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off opens in London's West end

1982 Little Shop of Horrors, by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, opens in New York

1982 The Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano is sunk by a British torpedo, with the loss of 368 lives

1982 Congress in Washington passes the Boland Amendment, banning US military aid to the Contras

1982 Chilean author Isabel Allende publishes her first novel, The House of the Spirits

1982 Dustin Hoffman, in Tootsie, plays a man who becomes a star in the persona of an actress

1982 5000 Argentinian troops land in the Falkland Islands, provoking war with Britain

1982 Steven Spielberg directs E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, in which an alien is stranded on earth and is befriended by a young boy

1982 The Saudi fundamentalist Osama bin Laden joins the mujaheddin in their fight against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan

1981 Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats, based on the Old Possum poems by T.S. Eliot, opens in London

1981 New South Stand built at Twickenham rugby ground.

1981 Leopoldo Galtieri becomes leader of the military junta ruling Argentina

1981 Polish prime minister imposes martial law and suspends Solidarnośc (Solidarity)

1981 16-year-old ballerina Sylvie Guillem joins the Paris Opera Ballet

1981 British snooker player Steve Davis wins the first of six world championship titles

1981 Sadat is peacefully succeeded in Egypt by his vice-president, Hosni Mubarak

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1981 Muslim terrorists assassinate Anwar el-Sadat, in response to his peace agreement with Israel

1981 Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson, dramatizes the rivalry between two British athletes at the 1924 Summer Olympics

1981 Stolen Generations, by Peter Read, reveals the scandal of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents

1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark launches an ongoing series for director Steven Spielberg and actor Harrison Ford

1981 English author Anita Brookner publishes her first novel, A Start in Life

1981 The IBM PC 5150, the first Personal Computer, is launched with a chip by Intel and software by Microsoft

1981 Prince Charles marries Diana Spencer in St Paul's Cathedral in London

1981 Karlheinz Stockhausen's Thursday from Light, the first of a seven-part opera cycle, is performed in Milan

1981 The Humber Bridge crosses the Humber estuary in Britain, and is the world's longest suspension bridge with a main span of 4626 feet (1410m)

1981 AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is described for the first time in a US medical journal

1981 A Turkish assailant in St Peter's Square in Rome shoots and seriously wounds John Paul II

1981 Australian entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch buys Britain's establishment newspaper, The Times, and its related titles

1981 Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children uses the moment of India's independence to launch an adventure in magic realism

1981 Francçois Mitterrand defeats Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the French presidential election

1981 War Music is the first instalment of Christopher Logue's version of the Iliad

1981 Veteran Communist leader Deng Xiaoping secures his position as the real power in China's government

1981 President Reagan is shot outside a hotel in Washington by John W. Hinckley Jr, but survives

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1981 Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan share a common economic viewpoint, following the policy known as monetarism

1981 Sandra Day O'Connor becomes the first woman appointed to the US Supreme Court

1981 Henry and Jane Fonda, father and daughter, star with Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond

1981 The Kremlin appoints a general, Wojciech Jaruzelski, as prime minister of Poland

1981 Rebels storm the Spanish parliament in Madrid and briefly hold the members hostage, in a military coup that fails

1981 The SDP hives off from Britain's Labour party – and seven years later merges with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats

1981 Iran releases the US embassy hostages immediately after the end of 's presidency

1980 100 years after her death George Eliot is given a memorial stone (denied to her in 1880) in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner

1980 Beatle John Lennon is murdered by a psychopath on the steps of his and Yoko Ono's apartment block in New York

1980 Republican Ronald Reagan wins the US presidential election against the incumbent Jimmy Carter

1980 Saddam Hussein invades Iran, beginning an 8-year war that will bring massive human cost

1980 Lech Walesa is elected chairman of the newly formed Polish trade union movement Solidarnośc (Solidarity)

1980 A trade union, Solidarnośc (Solidarity), is formed by strikers in the Gdansk shipyard in Poland

1980 US choreographer Mark Morris founds his own company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, based in New York

1980 Martin Scorsese directs Robert de Niro in Raging Bull

1980 US basketball champion Magic Johnson begins 12 years with the Los Angeles Lakers

1980 The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerges in India from previous Hindu nationalist

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groups and soon acquires a large following

1980 The Charter of Rights and Freedoms secures new aspects of Canada's national identity

1980 Electrician Lech Walesa emerges as the leader of a strike in the Gdansk shipyard in Poland

1980 The song O Canada, exacty a century old, is officially adopted as the country's national anthem

1980 A coup in Uganda brings Milton Obote back into power, and he is confirmed as president in a subsequent general election

1980 becomes independent, taking the name Zimbabwe, with Robert Mugabe as prime minister

1980 US author Sam Shepard's play True West has its premiere in New York

1980 A US helicopter mission fails disastrously in its attempt to rescue the embassy hostages in Tehran

1980 The threat of a hunger strike persuades the British government to authorize S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru), a television channel broadcasting in Welsh

1980 Italian academic Umberto Eco publishes The Name of the Rose, a medieval murder mystery

1980 Archbishop Oscar Romero, an exponent of liberation theology, is killed as he celebrates Mass in San Salvador

1980 The USA ends all aid to Nicaragua and provides funds to train and equip the Contras in neighbouring Honduras

1980 The small firm of Microsoft wins the contract to provide the operating system of the IBM personal computer

1979 The Global Commission for the Eradication of Smallpox announces that the world is free of the disease

1979 Britain agrees to fund the purchase of land of British farmers in willing to sell, for a much-needed land distribution programme

1979 A conference in London, at Lancaster House, finally achieves agreement on Southern Rhodesia

1979 Soviet troops invade Afghanistan to suppress anti-communist anarchy

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1979 Supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini seize the US embassy in Tehran, taking hostage 66 US citizens

1979 French paratroops bring to an end the savage rule of Bokassa in the Central African Republic

1979 British artist Richard Long lays out his Slate Circle at the Tate Gallery in London

1979 20-year-old US tennis player John McEnroe wins the singles title in the US Open for the first of four times

1979 Saddam Hussein begins a reign of terror in Iraq, reading out at a meeting the names of fellow Ba'thists who are to be taken out and shot

1979 Opponents of the Sandinistas flee from Nicaragua into Honduras, where they become known as the Contras

1979 Lord Mountbatten is killed by an IRA bomb that explodes on his boat in the bay of Donegal

1979 Daniel Ortega leads the Sandinistas to electoral victory in Nicaragua

1979 A Sandinista junta, headed by Daniel Ortega, takes power in Nicaragua – bringing to an end four decades of brutal rule by the Somoza dynasty

1979 Peter Shaffer's play about Mozart, Amadeus, has its premiere in London

1979 Young officers, led by flight lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, take power in a coup in Ghana

1979 John Paul II makes an emotional and influential return to Poland, the country of his birth

1979 The emergency measures underpinning military rule are repealed in Brazil, and an amnesty restores political rights

1979 The Conservative party wins the general election and Margaret Thatcher becomes Britain's first female prime minister

1979 April 29 The first flight by a solar-powered piloted aircraft is achieved when Larry Mauro's Solar Riser is able to climb to about 40 feet and glide for half a mile

1979 Communist measures in Afghanistan provoke a Muslim jihad and the murder of more than 100 Russians in Herat

1979 The first multiracial elections held in Rhodesia are won by bishop Abel Muzorewa

1979 Ex-president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is executed in Pakistan for allegedly authorizing the

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murder of a political opponent

1979 Partial meltdown of a US nuclear power station at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, spreads radioactive steam over a large surrounding area

1979 Idi Amin flees from Uganda as Tanzanian troops reach his capital, Kampala

1979 Francis Ford Coppola directs Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now

1979 Ayatollah Khomeini receives a rapturous welcome on his return to Iran to head the Islamic Revolutionary Committee

1979 Morocco annexes the Mauritanian part of the Western Sahara, thus taking control of the entire region

1979 An Islamic revolution forces the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to flee from Iran

1978 There are so many strikes in Britain this winter that it becomes known as the 'winter of discontent'

1978 Vietnamese forces invade Cambodia, driving out and the Khmer Rouge

1978 Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat share the Nobel Peace Prize

1978 Demonstrations take place throughout Iran, demanding Islamic rule under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini

1978 Belgian cyclist Eddie Merckz retires after a 14-year career with a record 445 victories

1978 Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla is elected pope and takes the name John Paul II

1978 David Attenborough writes and presents Life on Earth, a television series on evolution – the first of his many surveys of natural history

1978 A Catholic-Orthodox joint commission acknowledges the long-term aim of re- establishing full communion between the two churches

1978 Pope John Paul I dies, after a pontificate of only 33 days

1978 British author Ian McEwan publishes his first novel, The Cement Garden

1978 Anwar el-Sadat and Menachem Begin sign an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty at Camp David in the USA

1978 Sandinista guerrillas make a surprise attack on the National Palace in Nicaragua, taking more than 1000 people hostage

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1978 Italian cardinal Albino Luciani is elected pope and takes the name John Paul I

1978 Jomo Kenyatta dies in office as Kenya's president and is succeeded by his deputy, Daniel arap Moi

1978 Louise Brown, born in England, is the first test-tube baby, having been conceived by IVF (In vitro fertilization)

1978 English cricketer Ian Botham sets a new Test record, scoring a century and taking eight wickets against Pakistan at Lord's

1978 Czech-born US tennis player Martina Navratilova wins the first of nine singles titles at Wimbledon

1978 Douglas Adams creates Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a science fiction comedy series for BBC's Radio 4

1978 Shining Path and Tupac Amaru emerge as left-wing guerrilla groups in Peru

1978 Muhammad Ali is the first boxer to become world heavyweight champion three times, defeating Leon Spinks in a return match a year after losing the title

1978 English author Andrew Motion publishes his first collection of poems, The Pleasure Steamers

1978 Iris Murdoch publishes The Sea, the Sea, and wins the 1978 Booker Prize

1978 Former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro is abducted and assassinated by the terrorist

1978 John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey, with Leo McKern in the title role, begins its first series of six episodes on British TV

1978 A fire destroys St Mary's church in Barnes except for the tower and the south and east walls of the medieval chapel

1978 Hungarian composer György Ligeti's opera Le Grand Macabre has its premiere in Stockholm

1978 US author John Irving has wide success with his novel The World According to Garp

1978 Kenneth MacMillan turns a double suicide of 1889 into a ferociously dramatic ballet,

1977 In a multi-million dollar ceremony, Jean-Bédel Bokassa proclaims himself emperor of the Central African Republic

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1977 Anwar el-Sadat, the Egyptian president, travels to Jerusalem to propose a peace plan to the Israelis

1977 Steve Biko, founder of Black Consciousness, dies of head wounds received in police custody in Pretoria

1977 The Pompidou Centre, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, opens in Paris

1977 After making several films together, Woody Allen and his partner Diane Keaton have an Oscar-winning success with Annie Hall

1977 Elvis Presley dies, aged 42, at his home in Memphis, Tennessee

1977 Estonian composer Arvo Pärt completes his choral work Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten

1977 Zia ul-Haq, the Chief of Army Staff, takes power in a bloodless coup against the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto

1977 German author Botho Strauss's play Three Acts of Recognition wins him an international audience

1977 The French Territory of Afars and Issas becomes independent as Djibouti, with Hassan Gouled Aptidon as president

1977 The new building for the Public Record Office in Kew is first opened to the public, on the seventeenth of October

1977 George Lucas writes and directs a science fantasy, Star Wars, launching a narrative that will be expanded in a further five films

1977 A treaty provides for the gradual transfer of the Canal Zone from US to Panamanian control

1977 Likud leader Menachem Begin, at the head of a coalition government, becomes Israel's first non-socialist prime minister

1977 Steven Spielberg writes and directs an inflential science fiction movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind

1977 Royal tombs are excavated at Vergina, in Macedonia, probably including that of Philip of Macedon

1977 seizes control of Ethiopia's ruling Dergue (military council) in a violent coup

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1976 19-year-old Spanish golfer Severiano Ballesteros ends the year as number one in Europe

1976 The incumbent president is defeated by Democrat Jimmy Carter in the US election

1976 The much-hated Gang of Four are arrested in China within weeks of Mao Zedong's death

1976 Bulgarian-born US artist Christo (Christo Javacheff) constructs a 24-mile Running Fence in California

1976 Mao Zedong dies in Beijing, at the age of 82, and lies in state in the Great Hall of the People

1976 333 days after leaving Earth, the landing section of the US spacecraft Viking 2 touches down on Mars and begins sending back photographs

1976 Black American author Alex Haley traces his family origins in Africa in Roots

1976 Liverpool football player Kevin Keegan begins six years as captain of England

1976 The landing section of the US spacecraft Viking 1 detaches from the orbiter and makes a successful landing on Mars

1976 The Swedish tennis player Björn Borg wins the first of five consecutive singles titles at Wimbledon

1976 In a daring raid on Entebbe airport, Israeli troops rescue hostages hijacked on a flight from Tel Aviv to Paris

1976 Mario Soares becomes 's first democratically elected prime minister in half a century

1976 Hundreds of deaths and casualties result from police firing on a demonstration by schoolchildren in the black township of Soweto

1976 Pierre Boulez establishes in Paris IRCAM, an advanced institute for research into the techniques of modern music

1976 Britain's new National Theatre, designed by Denys Lasdun, opens on the South Bank in London,

1976 The Polisario, as a government-in-exile in Algeria, proclaim the independence of Western Sahara as the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic

1976 Polish composer Henryk Górecki completes his Third Symphony

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1976 A military coup in Argentina brings to an end the two-year presidency of Juan Perón's widow, Isabelita

1976 A guerrilla movement, with Rhodesian backing, launches a long civil war against Frelimo in Mozambique

1976 The British public is outraged to discover that the Tate Gallery has spent money purchasing Carl Andre's arrangement of bricks, Equivalent VIII

1976 The UN entrusts the Western Sahara to joint administration by Morocco and Mauritania

1976 Mary Leakey and her team find footprints, about 3.6 million years old, of bipedal hominids walking upright at Laetoli in Tanzania

1976 14-year-old Jodie Foster stars as a drug-addicted child prostitute in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver

1976 Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigns as the British prime minister and is succeeded by James Callaghan

1976 creates a ballet based on Turgenev's play A Month in the Country, to music by Chopin

1976 Portugal adopts a democratic constitution after 43 years of dicatorship

1976 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs design and market a personal computer, calling it the Apple

1976 Nkomo and Mugabe merge their guerrilla troops in a more effective disruptive force, to be known as the Patriotic Front

1976 Mikhail Baryshnikov dances in the New York premiere of 's ballet Push Comes to Shove

1975 Cuban troops, sent by Castro to Angola, clash with South African forces attempting to combat

1975 Malcolm Fraser becomes the Australian prime minister, winning the first of three general election victories

1975 Canadian novelist Robertson Davies completes his semi-autobiographical Deptford Trilogy

1975 The invasion of East Timor by Indonesia begins decades of guerrilla resistance and brutal repression

1975 In Angola the USA and USSR fund rival guerrilla groups, MPLA and UNITA

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1975 Robert Muldoon is prime minister of New Zealand after a National Party election victory

1975 Surinam wins independence from the Dutch, with Johan Ferrier as the first president

1975 English author Ruth Prawer Jhabwala wins the Booker Prize with her novel Heat and Dust

1975 Franco dies and is succeeded as Spanish head of state by Juan Carlos, heir to the Bourbon throne

1975 Australian governor-general Sir John Kerr appoints Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister

1975 There is political turmoil in Australia after the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, dismisses prime minister Gough Whitlam

1975 The British group the Sex Pistols launch punk rock, with their first gig at St Martin's School of Art in London

1975 Austrian racing driver Niki Lauda wins the first of three Formula One world championship titles

1975 Mark Brown is the last craftsman to build and hire rowing boats in the St Helena Boathouses, as the arches gradually become adapted to non-commercial purposes

1975 Excavation of the 5200-year-old passage grave at Newgrange in Ireland is completed

1975 School friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen found a software firm, calling it Microsoft

1975 The island of Papua New Guinea wins independence from Australia

1975 Mujibur Rahman, with most of his family, is assassinated by junior officers in a coup in Bangladesh

1975 US director Steven Spielberg has a major success with his second feature film, Jaws

1975 Czech choreographer Jiri Kylián becomes director of the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague

1975 Astronauts Tom Stafford and Aleksei Leonov shake hands when their and Soyuz craft successfully dock in space

1975 The Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa, become independent as the

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republic of Cape Verde

1975 Portuguese East Africa becomes independent as Mozambique, with Frelimo as the only political party

1975 David Hockney begins a new career as a set designer, with The Rake's Progress by Stravinksky at Glyndebourne

1975 Milos Forman directs Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, based on a novel by Ken Kesey

1975 Yakubu Gowon, who united Nigeria after the Biafran war, is thrown out in a military coup

1975 The first series of Fawlty Towers, co-written by and starring John Cleese, is broadcast on British TV

1975 US author E.L. Doctorow sets his novel Ragtime in the early years of the 20th century

1975 Khmer Rouge guerrillas, led by Pol Pot, take Phnom Penh and launch a genocidal reign of terror in Cambodia

1975 The Willis Faber building, by English architect Norman Foster, is completed in Ipswich

1975 South Vietnam surrenders, as President Duong Van Minh broadcasts an order to all South Viernames forces to lay down their arms

1975 The South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, is taken by North Vietnamese forces

1975 The king of Morocco sends 350,000 settlers across the border into Western Sahara

1975 Anatoly Karpov becomes world chess champion by default when Bobby Fischer fails to defend his title

1975 Chiang Kai-shek dies and is succeeded by his son, Chiang Ching-Kuo, as leader of the republic of China in Taiwan

1975 UNITA and the FNLA join forces to set up a rival Angolan government at Huambo, in the south of the country

1975 The republic of Dahomey changes its name to one already famous in African history – Benin

1975 Richard Burton marries Elizabeth Taylor for the second time, five years after divorcing

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1975 The MPLA, controlling the capital but not the country, declares itself the government of newly independent Angola

1975 The independence of Angola is established in the Alvor agreement between Portugal and three rival guerrilla groups, the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA

1975 Internment is ended in Ulster after the Gardiner Report states that it brings the law into disrepute

1974 It is estimated that during this year the population of the world reached four billion

1974 Cyclone Tracy devastates the Australian city of Darwin on Christmas Day, destroying 80% of the domestic buildings

1974 The Canadian province of Quebec introduces Bill 22, making French the province's sole official language

1974 The SNP achieves a surge in Scottish nationalism, winning eleven seats at Westminster on 30% of the Scottish vote

1974 Kenneth MacMillan uses Scott Joplin as his score for a ragtime ballet, Elite Syncopations

1974 Portuguese Guinea becomes independent as Guinea-Bissau, with Luís Cabral as president

1974 Muhammad Ali regains the world heavyweight title, beating George Foreman in Zaire in a fight that becomes known as the Rumble in the Jungle

1974 President Ford pardons ex-president Nixon for his part in the Watergate affair, thus r emoving the possibility of criminal charges

1974 Richard Nixon is succeeded as US president by his vice-president, Gerald Ford

1974 Faced by the prospect of impeachment over Watergate, President Nixon resigns

1974 Soviet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the Kirov company while on tour in Canada

1974 The House Judiciary Committee takes the first steps in the process of impeaching President Nixon, citing obstruction of justice

1974 The US Supreme Court orders President Nixon to hand over White House tapes of conversations relevant to Watergate

1974 Turkish troops invade and occupy northeast Cyprus, causing the island to be divided for decades to come

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1974 An uprising organized in Ethiopia by the Dergue results in the arrest of Haile Selassie and his murder a year later

1974 Isabel Perón becomes president of Argentina on the death of her husband Juan Perón

1974 German-born British art historian Nikolaus Pevsner completes his monumental 46- volume Buildings of England

1974 Jimmy Connors wins both Wimbledon and the US Open, on each occasion defeating the veteran Ken Rosewall

1974 US tennis player Chris Evert wins the first of three victories at Wimbledon and of seven in the French Open

1974 Golda Meir resigns and Yitzhak Rabin succeeds her as leader of the Labour party and Israeli prime minister

1974 Valéry Giscard d'Estaing defeats François Mitterrand in the French presidential election

1974 Former prime minister Harold Wilson returns to Downing Street as leader of a minority government, but wins a second general election later in the year

1974 Willy Brandt resigns and is succeeded by Helmut Schmidt, as leader of the SDP and chancellor of Germany

1974 Donald Johanson and Tom Gray find an almost complete Australopithecus female skeleton at Hadar in Ethiopia, and nickname her Lucy after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

1974 Augusto Pinochet takes sole power in Chile, at the head of a junta which governs with extreme brutality

1974 A military coup in Portugal ends four decades of Salazar's and Caetano's dictatorial New State

1974 More than 7000 life-size terracotta solders are unearthed at Xi'an, placed to guard the tomb of the third century BC Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi

1974 British physicist Stephen Hawking describes how black holes can emit radiation, a process now known as 'Hawking radiation'

1974 Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell dance together in the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan's Manon

1974 Alexander Solzhenitsyn is deported from the USSR to West Germany for publishing The Gulag Archipelago

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1973 Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, publishes his first novel, The Rachel Papers

1973 Patrick White is the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature

1973 A cease-fire brokered by the USA and UN brings the to and end after 18 days

1973 US author Erica Jong publishes her first novel, Fear of Flying

1973 Arab oil-exporting countries cause an economic crisis by denying oil to western countries supporting Israel

1973 Richard Nixon appoints Gerald Ford as his vice-president in place of the disgraced Spiro Agnew

1973 US vice-president Spiro Agnew resigns when convicted on charges of bribery

1973 Egypt and Syria launch a surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement

1973 The Sydney Opera House opens with a performance by Australian Opera of Prokofiev's War and Peace

1973 The first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, an exposé of Stalin's labour camps, is published in Paris

1973 Chilean president Salvador Allende dies in the Chilean capital, Santiago, in a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet

1973 Henry Kissinger, previously head of the National Security Council, is appointed US secretary of state

1973 William Friedkin directs a horror movie, The Exorcist, from a novel by William Peter Blatty

1973 The 77-year-old Juan Perón, after returning to Argentina, is once again elected president

1973 President Salvador Allende appoints Augusto Pinochet commander-in-chief of the Chilean army and brings him into the cabinet

1973 US author Stephen King publishes Carrie, the first of his many best-selling horror novels

1973 Likud is formed in Israel as an alliance of right-wing parties

1973 A military coup deposes Zahir Shah and brings to an end the hereditary monarchy

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in Afghanistan

1973 A military coup plunges democratic Uruguay into eleven years of repressive terror

1973 Work starts on a new building for the Public Record Office on the site of former government offices in Kew, Surrey

1973 The Watergate scandal claims its first senior victims with the resignation of two of Nixon's closest advisers, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman

1973 The career of virtuoso cellist du Pré's is cut short by multiple sclerosis

1973 Winning power in a military coup, Juvenal Habyarimana begins a 21-year spell as dictator in Rwanda

1973 The Polisario is formed to fight for the independence of Western Sahara

1973 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow conjures up weird events in wartime London

1973 The score of the film The Sting revives interest in Scott Joplin and ragtime

1973 Paul Newman and Robert Redford star in the film The Sting

1973 The Sears Tower opens in Chicago, displacing the Empire State as the tallest building in the world

1973 Thames Water Authority takes over from the Metropolitan Water Board and Hampton waterworks becomes part of Thames Water which is later privatised

1973 The last US troops leave Vietnam, ending American involvement in a continuing war between the north and south of the country

1973 Roe v. Wade establishes in US law that prohibiting abortion violates a woman's right to privacy

1973 US choreographer Twyla Tharp creates Deuce Coupe, set to songs by the Beach Boys

1973 British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher publishes an influential economic tract, Small is Beautiful

1973 Activists of the American Indian Movement survive a ten-week siege at Wounded Knee, winning international attention

1973 A Little Night Music, with lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim, has its premiere in New York

1973 In the Calder case, the Supreme Court of Canada recognizes Aboriginal title to land

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1973 Elvis Presley performs in Honolulu in the Aloha Concert, the first programme to be broadcast live round the world by satellite

1973 The Paris Peace Accords end the US combat role in Vietnam, with nothing achieved and millions dead

1973 Prime minister takes Britain into the European Community, on the third attempt

1973 Prime minister Jack Lynch leads Ireland into the European Community

1972 Russian composer Alfred Schnittke's First Symphony alarms the Soviet authorities and is denied a Moscow premiere

1972 Gough Whitlam is Australia's prime minister after Labor party victory

1972 Chess player Bobby Fischer defeats Boris Spassky to become the first US world champion

1972 Richard Nixon is re-elected US president with a landslide victory over Democrat George McGovern

1972 English poet James Fenton publishes his first collection, Terminal Moraine

1972 The Washington Post publishes the first report that the Watergate break-in was linked to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign

1972 English dramatist Caryl Churchill's first play, Owners, is produced in London

1972 Ferdinand Marcos declares martial law in the Philippines, citing the danger of a Communist takeover

1972 Aung San Ssu Kyi maries Michael Aris, an English academic specializing in the history of

1972 The Tuskegee syphilis experiment in Alabama becomes a major scandal after a whistle-blower reveals the details

1972 US swimmer Mark Spitz wins seven gold medals in the Munich Olympics

1972 The Orleans House Gallery is opened to the public, mounting a regular series of temporary exhibitions

1972 Eleven Israeli athletes are killed by Palestinian '' terrorists at the Munich Olympic Games

1972 Peter Maxwell Davies's opera Taverneris performed at Covent Garden

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1972 Francis Ford Coppola writes and directs The Godfather, the first of three related films

1972 Spanish director Luis Buñuel satirizes social conventions in his film Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

1972 Five burglars are arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee HQ at the Watergate office building in Washington

1972 Jean-Marie Le Pen founds a neo-Fascist party in France, the National Front

1972 Bernardo Bertolucci directs Marlon Brando in the sexually explicit film Last Tango in Paris

1972 Ultimos Ritos ('Last Rites'), an oratorio by John Tavener, has its first performance in Haarlem in the Netherlands

1972 The SALT 1 treaty is signed by the US and USSR, limiting anti-ballistic missiles

1972 In an orgy of ethnic slaughter in Burundi, Tutsis klll some 100,000 Hutus

1972 An Equal Rights Amendment is passed by Congress but fails when not ratified in sufficient states

1972 The British government suspends the parliament at Stormont and imposes direct rule from Westminster

1972 British paratroops open fire on a civil rights march in Derry, killing thirteen, in what becomes known as Bloody Sunday

1972 Aborigines pitch a Tent Embassy on Australia Day outside parliament in Canberra to highlight political injustices

1972 Sheikh Mujibur Rahman returns from prison in West Pakistan to become prime minister of the newly independent state of Bangladesh

1971 Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto takes over as president of Pakistan, now consisting only of its western half

1971 With the end of the war between Pakistan and India, East Pakistan becomes independent as Bangladesh

1971 Pakistan surrenders to India within a month of Indian intervention in the war to suppress East Pakistan

1971 Libya's political bible is now the Green Book by Muammar al-Gaddafi

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1971 The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), expelled from Jordan, makes a new base in Lebanon

1971 Peter Maxwell Davies moves to the Orkneys, where he founds (in 1977) the St Magnus Festival

1971 India intervenes in the Pakistan civil war on the side of East Pakistan, the future Bangladesh

1971 95-year-old Spanish cellist Pablo Casals conducts in New York his Hymn to the United Nations

1971 Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar is staged a year after being released as a record

1971 Greenpeace is founded in Canada to campaign against US nuclear testing

1971 British artist David Hockney paints a striking triple portrait in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy

1971 Stanley Kubrick directs Malcolm McDowell in a film of Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange

1971 Internment without trial, reintroduced in Ulster to deal with the developing crisis, is used at first only against Catholics suspected of terrorism

1971 In the Apollo 15 mission US astronauts David Scott and James Irwin drive the vehicle Rover-1 on the surface of the moon

1971 The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

1971 Gerry Adams is imprisoned for suspected IRA links but is released for lack of evidence

1971 19-year-old Aboriginal tennis player Evonne Goolagong wins the singles title at Wimbledon

1971 The arrest of Mujibur Rahman, together with brutal attempts at repression, turn resistance in East Pakistan into full-scale civil war

1971 Evidence of official deception concerning US involvement in Vietnam is published in as the Pentagon Papers

1971 King Hussein, alarmed at the continuing power of Palestinian guerrillas within Jordan, expels the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

1971 Mobutu gives the Congo a new name, Zaire, deriving from an African word for river

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1971 Awami League leader Mujibur Rahman declares unilaterally that Bangladesh (East Pakistan) is an independent state

1971 Ian Paisley and others in northern Ireland form the Democratic Unionist Party, as the intransigent wing of Ulster Unionism

1971 With support from Moscow, Erich Honecker takes 's place as leader of East Germany

1971 Duel, about a motorist terrorized by a truck driver, launches Stephen Spielberg's career as a film director in Hollywood

1971 The 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, succeeding his father as president of Haiti, becomes known as Baby Doc

1971 The Soviets put into orbit the first space station, Salyut 1, but the crew of three die on returning to earth

1971 Indian sitar-player Ravi Shankar composes the first of his two concertos for sitar and

1971 Hip-hop originates as a dance style in New York among young African Americans

1971 Joe Frazier becomes the first boxer to beat Muhammad Ali in a professional fight, at New York's Madison Square Gardens

1971 US and South Vietnamese troops cross the border to invade Laos

1971 Idi Amin leads a successful coup against the president of Uganda, Milton Obote

1971 The Dance Theatre of Harlem, founded by Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook, gives its first performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York

1970 Victorian extensions are stripped away, to return Asgill House to its original perfection both inside and outside

1970 The Queen’s School moves from Kew Green to Cumberland Road

1970 The outgoing Pakistan government, led by Yahya Khan, rejects the election result and sends troops to East Pakistan

1970 In the Pakistan election, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto wins a clear majority in West Pakistan

1970 Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League win on an independence platform in the election in East Pakistan

1970 Michael Tippett's opera The Knot Garden has its premiere at Covent Garden

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1970 Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima commits suicide in the traditional Samurai manner

1970 A Quebec government minister, Pierre Laporte, is murdered by the Front de Libération du Québec

1970 Alexander Solzhenitsyn wins the Nobel Prize for Literature but declines collecting it in Stockholm for fear of being denied re-entry to Russia

1970 King Hussein of Jordan orders the disarming of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after violent clashes with his own troops

1970 Nasser dies of a sudden heart attack and is succeeded as Egypt's president by Anwar el-Sadat

1970 Polish composer Witold Lutoslawksi writes a cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich

1970 The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) is formed in northern Ireland as a coalition of Catholic nationalists and civil-rights campaigners

1970 Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova defects to the west while on tour with the Kirov company in London

1970 US feminist Kate Millett's Sexual Politics is her doctoral dissertation on the exploitation of women

1970 US feminist Kate Millett's Sexual Politics is her doctoral dissertation on the exploitation of women

1970 Ba'thist leader Hafiz al-Assad takes power in a military coup in Syria

1970 A new Queen’s School is built in Cumberland Road, becoming Kew’s only Anglican school after the closure of the neighbouring St Luke’s School

1970 Italian playwright Dario Fo's black comedy Accidental Death of an Anarchist has its premiere in Milan

1970 Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik's Universal Prayer, a cantata setting poetry by Alexander Pope, has its premiere in New York

1970 Edward Heath is prime minister after leading the Conservatives to UK election victory

1970 Australian tennis player Margaret Court achieves the grand slam in singles, adding it to her previous grand slam in doubles

1970 Australian feminist Germaine Greer publishes The Female Eunuch as a wake-up call to women

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1970 Two students are killed at the all-black Jackson State College in Mississippi when police fire into a dormitory during a riot

1970 Four students are killed by National Guards during an anti- demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio

1970 President Nixon sends US troops into Cambodia to destroy Vietminh bases

1970 Qaboos bin Sa'id seizes the throne from his father, Sultan Sa'id, in a palace coup in Oman

1970 US film director Robert Altman launches a successful and long-running theme with his Vietnam black comedy, M*A*S*H

1970 Extensive repairs are carried out to the roof beams and walls at St John's where dry rot has penetrated and the organ is rebuilt

1970 Norodom Sihanouk is removed from power in Cambodia in a US-supported coup led by General Lon Nol

1970 Salvador Allende, heading a Socialist and Marxist coalition, is elected president in Chile

1970 Australian author David Malouf is first published as a poet, with his collection Bicycle and Other Poems

1970 The breakaway province of Biafra surrenders after three years of devastating civil war in Nigeria

1970 US author Maya Angelou publishes her autobiographical first novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

1969 British scientists Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards fertilize in a test-tube eggs removed from human ovaries

1969 Paintings discovered on stone slabs in a cave in Namibia are dated to about 28,000 years ago

1969 The ARPANET, linking computers in four US cities, is the first step towards the internet

1969 The Northern Irish player George Best is voted European Footballer of the Year

1969 Scottish Grand Prix racing driver Jackie Stewart wins the first of his three world championship titles

1969 Willy Brandt, leader of the SPD (Social Democratic Party), becomes chancellor of

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Germany

1969 Italian composer Luciano Berio completes his Sinfonia for eight voices and orchestra

1969 An engineer in the newly formed Intel Corporation designs the first programmable microchip

1969 Idris I, king of Libya, is deposed in a bloodless coup led by Muammar al-Gaddafi

1969 Australian tennis player Rod Laver is the first to win the Grand Slam a second time

1969 Canadian author Margaret Atwood publishes her first novel, The Edible Woman

1969 Nearly half a million people turn up for the Woodstock Music Festival at a dairy farm in Bethel, New York

1969 19-year-old rugby player J.P.R. Williams makes his debut for Wales in a match against Scotland

1969 Russian chess player Boris Spassky beats Tigran Petrosian to become world champion

1969 British film director John Schlesinger makes Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight

1969 Neil Armstrong, commander of the US space mission Apollo 11, sets foot on the moon and says: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'

1969 Mary Jo Kopechne drowns when US senator Edward Kennedy drives his car off the road on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts

1969 Space-traveller Billy Pilgrim suffers horrors in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five

1969 The Gang of Four achieve malign power during China's Cultural Revolution

1969 The Gang of Four achieve malign power during China's Cultural Revolution

1969 The Stonewall riots in New York prompt a US campaign for Gay and Lesbian rights

1969 Kew Pond is registered as common land under the Commons Registration Act 1965

1969 US novelist Philip Roth publishes Portnoy's Complaint, a monologue in which the hero gives his psychoanalyst a frank description of his sexual frustrations

1969 Paul Newman and Robert Redford star in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

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1969 Georges Pompidou is elected president of France in succession to de Gaulle

1969 President de Gaulle resigns after losing a plebiscite on government reform

1969 Moscow imposes Gustav Husak as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, with the brief to reverse Dubcek's reforms

1969 The first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus is broadcast on British TV

1969 Garrick's Villa, now listed Grade 1, is reconverted into nine flats

1969 Peter Maxwell Davies writes Eight Songs for a Mad King for the Pierrot Players

1969 Pakistan's president Ayub Khan hands over power to another general, Yahya Khan, who introduces martial law

1969 English novelist John Fowles publishes The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in Lyme Regis in the 1860s

1969 British artist duo Gilbert & George attract attention miming to Flanagan and Allen's Underneath the Arches

1969 The Anglo-French airliner Concorde makes its first supersonic test flight

1969 The Provisional IRA reintroduces terrorism to northern Ireland after Protestants attack a civil rights march

1969 On the death of Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir succeeds him as leader of a coalition government in Israel

1969 At a congress in Cairo, Yasser Arafat is appointed leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

1968 The US astronauts in Apollo 8 are the first humans to see (and photograph) the sight of the earth rising above the moon's horizon

1968 Three US astronauts become the first humans to leave the earth's orbit, reaching the moon and going into its orbit in Apollo 8

1968 Harvard academic Henry Kissinger is selected by President Nixon as his national security adviser

1968 Republican candidate Richard Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey in the US presidential election

1968 Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis marries Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of ` the assassinated president

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1968 The first civil rights march in northern Ireland, in Derry, is halted by the police with batons and water cannon

1968 Reformist Czech leader Alexander Dubcek is arrested and flown to Moscow

1968 Soviet and troops invade Czechoslovakia to end the

1968 Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke create the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on Clarke's 1951 short story The Sentinel

1968 Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel Cancer Ward is smuggled to New York for publication

1968 Antonio de Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, suffers a stroke and is replaced by Marcelo Caetano

1968 Gore Vidal publishes Myra Breckenridge, featuring a lively transsexual as the central character

1968 Catholic bishops in Latin America, plagued by oppressive regimes, develop the concept of liberation theology

1968 US athlete Bob Beamon sets a world long-jump record of 8.9 metres that will stand for 23 years

1968 Barbara Streisand repeats her Broadway performance in the film of Funny Girl

1968 A military coup in Iraq brings to power a government composed mainly of Ba'thists

1968 Raden Suharto is elected president, formalizing his already de facto succession to Sukarno as the Indonesian dictator

1968 Pope Paul VI issues the encyclical Humanae Vitae, condemning all methods of artificial birth control

1968 English biographer Michael Holroyd completes his two-volume life of Lytton Strachey

1968 Norman Mailer publishes The Armies of the Night, based on his experiences on an anti-Vietnam demonstration in Washington in October 1967

1968 The Parti Québécois is formed in Canada by René Lévesque

1968 A student revolt begins in Paris and sweeps through France, shaking de Gaulle's government

1968 Peter Nzube finds the oldest skull yet discovered in the Olduvai Gorge and names

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the specimen Twiggy, after the British fashion model of the time

1968 US artist Sol LeWitt buries a metal cube in the Netherlands to create Box in a Hole

1968 The United Nations, with the approval of Britain as the colonial power, imposes economic sanctions on Rhodesia

1968 begins sixteen almost unbroken years as Liberal leader and prime minister of Canada

1968 AIM (American Indian Movement) is founded to improve the status of native Americans, or American Indians

1968 British racing driver Jim Clark is killed in an accident on the Hockenheim circuit, while leading in the world championship

1968 US civil rights leader Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, by escaped convict James Earl Ray

1968 Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung ('Tuning') employs six unaccompanied voices for 75 minutes

1968 Ezra Pound publishes his last collection of cantos, Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX - CXVII

1968 Robert Kennedy enters the race for the Democratic presidential nomination

1968 US soldiers massacre hundreds of unarmed civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai

1968 Spanish Guinea becomes an independent republic as Equatorial Guinea, with Francisco Macias Nguema as president

1968 British actor Richard Attenborough makes his first film as a director, Oh! What a Lovely War

1968 New Czech leader Alexander Dubcek facilitates the Prague Spring, aiming in his words to provide 'socialism with a human face'

1968 Lyndon Johnson announces that he will not stand for re-election as US president

1968 The Vietcong launch widespread attacks on South Vietnamese cities during the Tet (lunar new year) holiday

1968 Alexander Dubcek becomes first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist party, following pressure for reform from party intellectuals

1967 Australian prime minister Harold Holt swims in heavy surf near Portsea, south of

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Melbourne, and is never seen again

1967 The Beatles release an immensely successful album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with a cover by British pop-artist Peter Blake

1967 South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard, in Cape Town, transplants the heart of a young woman into a 55-year-old grocer, Louis Washkansky

1967 Nicolae Ceauşescu becomes president of the State Council of Romania

1967 English cellist Jacqueline du Pré marries Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim

1967 US author William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner describes a historical slave revolt in 1831

1967 A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, by English dramatist Peter Nichols, has its premiere in London

1967 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras issue a joint declaration, emphasizing mutual respect for each other's traditions

1967 Three young Liverpool poets publish a shared anthology under the title The Mersey Sound

1967 English playwright Alan Ayckbourn has his first success with Relatively Speaking

1967 English author Angela Carter wins recognition with her quirky second novel, The Magic Toyshop

1967 Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty star in the film Bonnie and Clyde

1967 Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara is captured and executed in Bolivia

1967 Congress passes a Freedom of Information Act, giving the public an important new right in the USA

1967 British composers Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies found the Pierrot Players

1967 President de Gaulle, visiting Montreal for Expo 67, proclaims Vive le Quebec libre ('Long Live Free Quebec')

1967 Pope Paul VI visits the Patriarch Athenagoras in Istanbul, shocking some Catholics that this visit has preceded one by the Patriarch to Rome

1967 Thurgood Marshall, appointed by President Johnson, becomes the first African American member of the US Supreme Court

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1967 British research student Jocelyn Bell and her Cambridge supervisor Antony Hewish identify the first known pulsar

1967 Israel captures the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War

1967 Israel captures East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan

1967 Israel captures the Gaza Strip and Sinai peninsula from Egypt

1967 A pre-emptive air strike by Israel destroys almost all Egypt's aircraft and launches the Six-Day War

1967 Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez publishes a classic of magic realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude

1967 English yachtsman Francis Chichester completes a record round-the-world voyage, sailing 29,600 miles solo in 226 days

1967 The US pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal is a geodesic dome by the architect Buckminster Fuller

1967 Canada mounts the world exhibition Expo 67 as the centrepiece of its centennial celebrations

1967 The Ibo of eastern Nigeria claim independence for their region – as the republic of Biafra

1967 A Bigger Splash, by English painter David Hockney, casts a new light on sunlit swimming pools

1967 Luis Buñuel directs Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, a film about a bored housewife who takes a day job as a prostitute

1967 A coup in Greece brings in an incompetent and repressive military junta that becomes known as the 'Greek colonels'

1967 US poet Anne Sexton publishes Live or Die, a collection containing a poem to her dead friend Sylvia Plath

1967 Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman has a great success when published posthumously

1967 Mike Nicholls directs Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in the film The Graduate

1966 Che Guevara arrives in Bolivia in the hope of fomenting a left-wing revolution

1966 Former chief Seretse Khama becomes the first president of an independent Botswana

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1966 US author Susan Sontag publishes her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation

1966 116 children die when a sliding slag heap buries a primary school in the Welsh village of Aberfan

1966 Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, better known as the 'Little Red Book', is the constant companion of every Red Guard

1966 The Black Panther Party is founded in Oakland, California, to launch a more ggressive campaign for civil rights

1966 The Whale, a cantata by English composer John Tavener, has its premiere at the inaugural concert of the London Sinfonietta

1966 Gurindji people at the Wave Hill station walk out in protest, launching the Aboriginal land rights movement in Australia

1966 Prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd is stabbed to death in the South African parliament

1966 Mao Zedong unleashes China's teenagers as violent Red Guards to spearhead his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

1966 Alf Ramsey (manager) and Bobby Moore (captain) lead the England football team to victory in the World Cup

1966 Construction work begins on the twin towers for the World Trade Center in New York, designed by US architect Minoru Yamasaki

1966 UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi, joins the fight for Angolan independence

1966 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard, is produced at the Edinburgh Festival

1966 After a long period of obscurity, Wide Sargasso Sea brings novelist Jean Rhys back into the literary limelight

1966 The US tennis player Billie Jean King wins the first of six Wimbledon singles titles

1966 British fashion designer Mary Quant launches the miniskirt

1966 Communist leaders Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping are attacked in China's Cultural Revolution as the biggest and worst 'capitalist roaders'

1966 Irish poet Seamus Heaney wins critical acclaim for Death of a Naturalist, his first volume containing more than a few poems

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1966 Plaid Cymru sends its first MP to Westminster when Gwynfor Evans wins a Carmarthen by-election

1966 Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the Awami League, demands full autonomy for East Pakistan (Bangladesh)

1966 NATO headquarters moves to Brussels after de Gaulle expels all NATO personnel from French soil

1966 Leonid Brezhnev, taking the title General Secretary (last used by Stalin), makes it plain that he is the Soviet leader

1966 English novelist Paul Scott publishes The Jewel in the Crown, the first volume in his 'Raj Quartet'

1966 British actor Michael Caine makes his name starring in two outstanding films within the year, Alfie and The Ipcress File

1966 Joaquin Balaguer, a close associate of Trujillo, is elected president of the Dominican Republic

1966 Suharto forces the Indonesian president, Achmed Sukarno, to hand over to him all executive powers

1966 The Soviet spacecraft Luna 10 orbits the moon and broadcasts the Internationale to the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party

1966 Austrian author Peter Handke provokes interest with his first play Offending the Audience

1966 Real-life husband and wife Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor star as the married couple in the film of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

1966 Scientists at the US Geological Survey develop the theory of plate tectonics as the explanation of continental drift

1966 Jean-Bedel Bokassa takes power in a coup in the Central African Republic

1966 Kwame Nkrumah, the founding father of Ghana, is toppled in a coup while away on a state visit to China

1966 The Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 is the first to achieve a soft-landing on the moon and to send back photographic data from the surface

1966 Robert Menzies retires as Australian prime minister and is succeeded by Harold Holt

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1966 Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, becomes India's prime minister as leader of the Congress party

1965 The Second Vatican Council ends, having made some radical changes in the ritual and attitudes of the Roman Catholic church

1965 German performance artist Joseph Beuys walks round a gallery demonstrating How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare

1965 Ian Smith makes a unilateral declaration of Rhodesia's independence

1965 Footballer Franz Beckenbauer plays his first international for West Germany

1965 Mobutu stages his second coup in the Congo and this time takes power as president

1965 Based on interviews given to Alex Haley in 1964, a life of Malcolm X is published soon after his assassination

1965 Karaoke (abbreviated from the Japanese for 'empty orchestra') evolves in Japan

1965 A UN-sponsored cease-fire brings the second Indo-Pakistan war to an end after less than three weeks

1965 After a summer of border skirmishes in Pakistan, an Indian advance towards Lahore initiates full-scale war between the two countries

1965 Riots break out in the Watts area of Los Angeles

1965 Stanley Matthews plays his last game for Stoke City after 34 years as a professional football player

1965 US author Randall Jarrell's poem The Lost World provides the title for his last published book

1965 US choreographer Robert Joffrey founds a new company that becomes known (from 1977) as the

1965 Zahir Shah allows the first elections in his kingdom of Afghanistan

1965 President Johnson introduces affirmative action as a legislative policy to redress social inequalities

1965 An exhibition in New York, 'The Responsive Eye', puts op art on the map

1965 Maria Callas gives her last performance, as Tosca at Covent Garden in London

1965 Terence O'Neill and Séan Lemass, prime ministers of Northern Ireland and Ireland,

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have two unprecedented meetings

1965 Student demonstrations against Ne Win's rule become regular occurrences, suppressed with military violence

1965 Ferdinand Marcos wins a landslide victory in the Philippines presidential election

1965 Defence minister Houari Boumédienne leads a coup to oust President Ben Bella in Algeria

1965 Singapore leaves the Federation of Malaysia to become again an independent state

1965 18-year-old Austrian body-builder Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes Junior Mr Europe (on his way to Mr World and Mr Universe)

1965 18-year-old Dutch footballer Johann Cruyff joins Ajax, the club with which he will be associated in numerous successes

1965 Ralph Nader begins a long career in consumer protection with Unsafe at Any Speed, attacking the US automobile industry

1965 Australia sends a first contingent of 1500 troops to fight in Vietnam

1965 Neil Simon's play The Odd Couple is produced in New York

1965 Woody Allen makes his screen debut with What's New Pussycat?

1965 US marines intervene in civil war in the Dominican Republic to prevent a communist takeover

1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras preside over simultaneous ceremonies, in Rome and Istanbul, revoking the mutual excommunications of 1054

1965 The first communications satellite, Early Bird, is launched from Cape Carnaveral

1965 Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov is the first to walk in space, moving round outside the Voshkod 2 spacecraft for more than ten minutes

1965 The Vietnam War enters a new dimension with the deployment of US ground troops in the country

1965 George Grant publishes an influential political tract, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism

1965 Black activist and convert to Islam Malcolm X is assassinated when giving a speech in the Audubon Ballroom in New York

1965 The Gambia becomes an independent member of the Commonwealth, with Dawda

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Jawara as prime minister

1965 The General Assembly of the UN asks Argentina and Britain to enter negotiations on their long-running dispute over the Falklands

1965 David Lean directs Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in a film of Pasternak's Dr Zhivago

1965 dies, and lies in state in London's ancient Westminster Hall

1965 and Rudolf Nureyev dance together in the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet

1965 US President Lyndon Johnson launches a regular bombing campaign against North Vietnam

1965 A royal proclamation formally establishes the new national flag of Canada

1964 Surgeons Michael Bakey in the USA and Vasilii Kolesov in the USSR pioneer coronary bypass surgery, using the patient's mammary artery

1964 The immediate introduction of comprehensive schools in Britain, in place of grammar schools, is Labour party policy

1964 Canadian author Marshall McLuhan declares, in Understanding Media, that 'the medium is the message'

1964 A military junta seizes power in Bolivia, ending the 12-year left-wing regime of Paz Estenssoro

1964 The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, linking and Staten Island, is the world's longest suspension bridge with a main span of 4260 feet (1298m)

1964 Lyndon B. Johnson is elected US president in his own right, winning decisively against Republican Barry Goldwater

1964 The Second Vatican Council issues a decree recognizing the legitimacy and apostolic origins of many of the beliefs and practices of the Greek Orthodox church

1964 Ayatollah Khomeini, exiled by the shah from Iran, moves first to and then makes his base in Iraq

1964 Kenneth Kaunda becomes president of the independent republic of Zambia, previously Northern Rhodesia

1964 Dickens Close, with eight new houses, is built on 3.5 acres of the Elm Lodge gardens

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1964 Harold Wilson becomes prime minister after Labour narrowly wins the UK general election

1964 The USSR enters a brief period of coalition leadership by Alexei Kosygin as prime minister and Leonid Brezhnev as Party First Secretary

1964 Nikita Khrushchev is forced from office as Soviet leader by a conservative faction that includes Leonid Brezhnev

1964 Martin Luther King wins the Nobel Peace Prize for leading non-violent resistance to racial discrimination in the USA

1964 US author Saul Bellow publishes Herzog, a novel featuring a professor of history who is a compulsive sender of messages

1964 US author Joyce Carol Oates publishes her first novel, With Shuddering Fall

1964 After graduating from college in India, Aung San Suu Kyi moves to England to continue her education at St Hugh's College in Oxford

1964 New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock publishes her first collection, The Eye of the Hurricane

1964 Peter Sellers plays three different roles in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

1964 The Beatles reach number one in both the UK and the US with their single 'Can't Buy Me Love'

1964 Two men are hanged in Britain, in the last use of capital punishment before its abolition in 1965

1964 A reported incident in the Gulf of Tonkin triggers US intervention against North Vietnam, in a significant step towards the Vietnam War

1964 Hastings Banda is prime minister of the newly independent nation of Malawi, formerly Nyasaland

1964 The Beijing ballet company goes political with The Red Detachment of Women, supervised by Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing

1964 English author A.S. Byatt publishes her first novel, Shadow of a Sun

1964 President Johnson pushes through a Civil Rights Act against strong Senate opposition

1964 Fiddler on the Roof, based on a novel by Sholom Aleichem, opens on Broadway with Zero Mostel playing Tevye the Milkman

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1964 In a match at the Oval, England cricketer Freddie Trueman becomes the first bowler to take 300 Test wickets

1964 Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life imprisonment and is sent to a gaol on Robben Island

1964 Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead takes its title from the last poem, about modern disregard for a Civil War monument

1964 The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is founded at a congress in East Jerusalem, then part of Jordan

1964 Papa Doc Duvalier, ruling through the brutal Tontons Macoutes, makes himself president of Haiti for life

1964 US poet John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs introduce Henry, his alter ego

1964 US physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover cosmic background radiation, lending strong support to the Big Bang theory

1964 Roald Dahl publishes a fantasy treat for a starving child, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

1964 Louis Leakey and his team discover in the Olduvai Gorge the first known specimen of the species Homo Habilis, named for its supposed tool-making abilities

1964 Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) becomes world heavyweight champion for the first time, defeating Sonny Liston

1964 Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge as the United Republic of Tanzania

1964 Ian Smith, now prime minister of Rhodesia, arrests leading black politicians Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe

1964 Senior officers in Brazil seize power, alleging the threat of an imminent communist takeover

1964 Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley begin a famous partnership in Ashton's

1964 British film stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor marry

1964 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras meet in Jerusalem, in the first such meeting since 1438

1963 The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dissolved, as the three colonies go their separate ways

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1963 Kenya becomes independent, with Jomo Kenyatta as prime minister

1963 Zanzibar becomes an independent nation and a member of the Commonwealth

1963 An invasion of Rwanda by Tutsi guerrillas prompts the first major Hutu massacre of Tutsis

1963 Chief suspect Lee Harvey Oswald is shot by night-club owner Jack Ruby just two days after the assassination of President Kennedy

1963 On the death of John F. Kennedy, Vice-president Lyndon Johnson succeeds him as president of the USA

1963 President Kennedy is shot in a motorcade driving through downtown Dallas, in Texas

1963 On Macmillan's advice to the Queen, Lord Home (rather than ) succeeds him as prime minister

1963 Harold Macmillan, in hospital for a prostate operation, resigns as UK prime minister

1963 The Tupamaros are formed as an urban guerrilla group in Uruguay

1963 Scottish Grand Prix driver Jim Clark wins the first of his two Formula One titles

1963 Macmillan resigns on grounds of ill health and is succeeded by Alec Douglas-Home as UK premier

1963 resigns after 14 years as Chancellor of West Germany and is succeeded by his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard

1963 Andy Warhol moves into films with Sleep, showing a man asleep for six hours

1963 Sexual intercourse begins in this year, according to Philip Larkin's 1974 poem Annus Mirabilis

1963 Malaysia, Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah form the Federation of Malaysia

1963 Australian tennis players Margaret Court and Ken Fletcher achieve the grand slam in mixed doubles

1963 'I have a dream' says Martin Luther King to 200,000 civil rights demonstrators in Washington

1963 Bob Marley and five others form a band, the Wailers, that will for the first time give Jamaican music a global following

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1963 Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, retires after building the company to international stature

1963 In The Feminine Mystique US feminist Betty Friedan challenges the stereotypical view of woman's role

1963 Robert Mugabe and Ndabaningi Sithole split from ZAPU to found ZANU, the Zimbabwe African National Union

1963 The Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed by the USA, USSR and UK, is the first of many international attempts to limit the threat of nuclear war

1963 English author Margaret Drabble publishes her first novel, A Summer Birdcage

1963 Saloth Sar, changing his name to Pol Pot, begins to build up the Cambodian Communist party and Khmer Rouge

1963 Terence O'Neill succeeds Basil Brooke (Lord Brookeborough) as Northern Ireland's prime minister

1963 President Kennedy, in divided Berlin, makes the dramatic declaration: Ich bin ein Berliner ('I am a Berliner')

1963 Ayatollah Khomeini is arrested in Qom, and imprisoned for eight months in Tehran, after instigating riots against the Shah

1963 British diplomat Kim Philby defects to the USSR and is discovered to have been a Soviet spy

1963 Italian cardinal Giovanni Montini is elected pope and takes the name Paul VI

1963 US author and illustrator Maurice Sendak publishes a fantasy for young children, Where the Wild Things Are

1963 Young British architects Norman Foster and Richard Rogers work together as Team 4

1963 Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space, flying solo in Vostok 6

1963 John Profumo resigns from- his cabinet position after admitting that he had lied to the House of Commons about his relationship with Christine Keeler

1963 Pope John XXIII dies, only a few month's after the start of the great Vatican council that he has summoned

1963 US environmentist Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, an impassioned warning of ecological disaster

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1963 Liberal leader Lester Pearson begins five years at the head of minority governments in Canada

1963 A scandal involving the minister of war, John Profumo, damages the Macmillan government in Britain

1963 Mary McCarthy's novel The Group follows the subsequent adventures of eight fellow graduates from Vassar

1963 Gideon v. Wainwright establishes that every defendant in a US court has the right to be represented by a lawyer

1963 John Profumo, secretary of state for war, tells the House of Commons there is no truth in rumours about a sexual relationship between himself and Christine Keeler

1963 British choreographer Frederick Ashton creates and Armand for Margot Fonteyn and her new partner, Rudolf Nureyev

1963 English author John Le Carré publishes a Cold-War thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

1963 Moise Tshombe's rebel regime in Katanga crumbles, and he flees to Spain

1963 US poet Sylvia Plath commits suicide in London

1963 A military coup in Syria brings the Ba'th party to power

1963 French president vetoes Britain's application to join the European Economic Community

1963 US poet Sylvia Plath publishes under a pseudonym her only novel, The Bell Jar

1962 British surgeon John Charnley pioneers the technique of joint replacement, giving a patient a new hip in a small hospital in Wrightington

1962 Anthony Burgess publishes A Clockwork Orange, a novel depicting a disturbing and violent near-future

1962 Mrs Ionides leaves the Octagon, stables and the site of Orleans House to the Borough of Twickenham to be used as a public gallery

1962 In The Gutenberg Galaxy Canadian author Marshall McLuhan develops the concept of the 'global village'

1962 Dmitry Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony sets poems from Yevtushenko's Babi Yar I

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1962 Fidel Castro releases, for $53 million in food and medicine, the Cuban exiles taken prisoner in the Bay of Pigs fiasco

1962 China prevails in a five-week war with India over disputed boundaries

1962 British Grand Prix driver Graham Hill wins the first of two world championship titles

1962 In Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov tells his story through an editor's annotations to a poem

1962 Finnish-born US architect Eero Saarinen completes his TWA terminal for New York's Kennedy airport

1962 A deal between President Kennedy and Soviet premier Khrushchev defuses the

1962 US dramatist Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens on Broadway

1962 British author P.D. James's first novel, Cover Her Face, introduces her poet detective Adam Dalgleish

1962 President Kennedy sends the US navy to prevent delivery of Soviet missiles to Cuba

1962 US intelligence reveals nuclear missile bases under construction in Cuba, causing an international crisis

1962 The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican begins, 94 years after the start of the First Vatican Council under Pius IX

1962 The former British colony of Uganda becomes an independent republic, with Milton Obote as prime minister

1962 The Sandinistas emerge as a guerrilla group in opposition to the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua

1962 The Trans-Canada Highway is completed, stretching some 5000 miles across the continent

1962 Khrushchev permits publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the literary journal Novy Mir

1962 17-year-old English cellist Jacqueline du Pré creates a stir playing Elgar's concerto in the Royal Festival Hall

1962 , a leading ayatollah in Qom, denounces the Shah of Iran and declares a fatwa against his regime

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1962 David Lean directs Peter O'Toole in the title role of the film Lawrence of Arabia

1962 The veteran left-wing politician Victor Haya is elected president of Peru but is thwarted by a coup led by General Ricardo Godoy

1962 Marilyn Monroe dies in Los Angeles from an overdose of sleeping pills

1962 Foreign visits to Burma are restricted to three days (extended in the next decade to one week)

1962 Harold Macmillan dismisses a third of his cabinet, including his chancellor, in what becomes known as 'the night of the long knives'

1962 US golfer Jack Nicklaus turns professional and in the same year wins the first of four US Open titles

1962 A massive yes vote in a referendum is immediately followed by French recognition of Algerian independence

1962 A peaceful demonstration at Rangoon university is dispersed by gunfire, resulting in the death of dozens of students

1962 Ian Smith's white supremacist party, the Rhodesian Front, wins power in Rhodesia's election

1962 British dancer Peggy van Praagh is appointed the first director of the newly formed Australian Ballet

1962 Bette Davis and Joan Crawford star in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane

1962 Students for a Democratic Society publish in Michigan The Port Huron Statement, a seminal text of the New Left

1962 In a series of informal meetings, Harold Macmillan tries to persuade Charles de Gaulle that Britain should join the EEC

1962 British author Doris Lessing publishes an influential feminist novel, The Golden Notebook

1962 The Reivers, the last of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, is published just a month before his death

1962 Adolf Eichmann, convicted in Israel for his role in the Holocaust, is hanged in Tel Aviv

1962 The Eritrean parliament votes to merge fully with Ethiopia, ending Eritrean

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autonomy

1962 Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, setting poems by Wilfred Owen, is first performed in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral

1962 John Ashbery's radical collection The Tennis Court Oath includes poems composed of sliced up fragments

1962 A great tapestry by Graham Sutherland hangs above the altar in the newly consecrated Coventry cathedral

1962 Coventry's new cathedral is inaugurated, enhanced by a wide range of work by leading British artists

1962 US choreographer creates a ballet to the music of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire

1962 The Rolling Stones, led by Mick Jagger, give their first performance as a group, in London's Marquee Club

1962 President de Gaulle makes a surprise appointment, selecting the little-known Georges Pompidou to be the French premier

1962 Sam Walton opens the first Wal-Mart Discount store, in Rogers, Arkansas

1962 James Baldwin's third novel Another Country explores the conflicts in the life of a young unemployed black musician

1962 US singer Bob Dylan writes one of his best-known songs, Blowin' in the Wind (included in his 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan)

1962 Frelimo emerges as a Marxist guerrilla group dedicated to winning independence for Mozambique

1962 General Ne Win seizes power in a coup in Burma and establishes a single-party isolationist dictatorship

1962 Andy Warhol creates a stir when his paintings of Campbell's soup cans are exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles

1962 Sean Connery creates on screen the role of 007 in the first James Bond film, Dr No

1961 British novelist Muriel Spark publishes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, set in an Edinburgh school in the 1930s

1961 Tanganyika becomes an independent nation with Julius Nyerere as prime minister

1961 Rudolf Nureyev makes his first appearance in a western company, dancing in The

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Sleeping Beauty for the Marquis de Cuevas

1961 The southern part of the British Cameroons votes to merge with Cameroun, becoming the federal republic of Cameroon

1961 Largely under the influence of Tito, a summit is held by nations eager to be non- aligned in the Cold War

1961 The UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, dies in a plane crash while trying to secure peace in Katanga

1961 French film director François Truffaut makes Jules et Jim, starring Jeanne Moreau and Oskar Werner

1961 The East German government erects the Berlin Wall to prevent an exodus of its citizens

1961 Britain formally tables an application to join the European Economic Community

1961 Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski uses 'aleatory counterpoint' in his Venetian Games

1961 In Babi Yar the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko tackles the subject of Russian anti-Semitism

1961 Two French generals, Raoul Salan and Edmond Jouhaud, form the OAS (Organisation de l'Armée Secrète) to preserve French rule in Algeria

1961 Caribbean novelist V.S. Naipaul features his Trinidad family in A House for Mr Biswas

1961 Arthur Miller writes the screenplay for The Misfits for his wife, Marilyn Monroe

1961 US astronaut Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space, with a suborbital flight in Freedom 7

1961 Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti makes his operatic debut in Reggio Emilia, as Rodolfo in La Bohème

1961 Joshua Nkomo founds ZAPU, the Zimbabwe African People's Union, in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia

1961 Two days after landing in the Bay of Pigs, 114 Cuban exiles are dead and about 1300 have been captured

1961 An invasion force of about 1500 Cuban exiles comes ashore in Cuba's Bay of Pigs in an attempt to topple the Castro regime

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1961 British author Roald Dahl publishes a novel for children, James and the Giant Peach

1961 Former British colony Sierra Leone becomes an independent state within the Commonwealth

1961 Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel in space, orbiting the earth once in Vostok 1

1961 The trial of Adolf Eichmann begins in an Israeli court in Jerusalem, with TV cameras permitted to broadcast the event live around the world

1961 J.D. Salinger publishes Franny and Zooey, the second of his collections of stories about the Glass family

1961 Atmosphères, by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, achieves a mysterious blend of sound in what he calls 'micropolyphony'

1961 President Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps, enabling US volunteers to work abroad

1961 Hassan II begins a 38-year reign as the king of Morocco

1961 Political activist Jane Jacobs publishes an influential polemic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

1961 Patrice Lumumba is sent to Katanga, where he is murdered

1961 President Kennedy appoints his younger brother Robert to the position of US attorney-general

1960 It is estimated that during this year the population of the world reached three billion

1960 British artist Bridget Riley creates patterns that produce unexpected optical effects, in a style that becomes known as op art

1960 Penguin Books are prosecuted for obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and are acquitted

1960s The remaining part of Whitton Tower or Whitton Castle, a gothic tower built in the grounds of Whitton Park in the 1740s, is demolished.

1960 The Vietcong, or NLF, is formed as a guerrilla force to liberate South Vietnam from the US-backed government

1960 Democrat candidate John F. Kennedy defeats Republican Richard Nixon in the US presidential election

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1960 Albert Luthuli, president of the ANC in South Africa, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

1960 Keith Holyoake begins twelve unbroken years as New Zealand's prime minister

1960 US author John Updike begins to chart the fictional progress of Harry Angstrom, known as Rabbit, in Rabbit, Run

1960 The French colony of Mauritania becomes independent, with Moktar Ould Daddah as president

1960 British artist Anthony Caro begins welding and painting abstract metal sculpture

1960 Patrice Lumumba, the dismissed prime minister of the Congo, is arrested on the orders of the army chief of staff, Mobutu Sese Seko

1960 Nigeria wins independence, with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as prime minister, but its stability is threatened by tribal and regional factions

1960 The French colony of Senegal becomes independent, with Léopold Senghor as the new nation's first president

1960 Paul Scofield plays Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons

1960 Mobutu Sese Seko takes power in a military coup in the midst of chaos in the Congo

1960 The French Congo becomes independent as the republic of Congo, with Fulbert Youlou as president

1960 The French colony of Ubangi-Shari becomes independent and takes the name Central African Republic

1960 The French colony of Gabon becomes independent with Léon M'ba as president

1960 US novelist John Barth publishes The Sot-Weed Factor, a picaresque life of Edmund Cook set on a family tobacco plantation in Maryland

1960 Neo-Pentecostalism, also known as Charismatic Renewal, becomes an important element within many Christian denominations

1960 The French colony of Chad becomes independent with François Tombalbaye as president

1960 The English revue Beyond the Fringe has its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival

1960 Alfred Hitchcock directs Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in Psycho

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1960 Félix Houphouët-Boigny, first president of the newly independent Ivory Coast, begins thirty-three years of relatively peaceful rule

1960 The pamphlet Control or Colour Bar? demands reform of White Australia policy

1960 The French colony of Upper Volta becomes independent as Burkina Faso, with Maurice Yaméogo as president

1960 Kenyatta, still in prison, is elected leader of KANU, a new political party in Kenya

1960 Niger becomes independent, with Hamani Diori as the new nation's first president

1960 The French colony of Dahomey (known from 1975 as Benin) becomes independent but suffers six military coups in its first twelve years

1960 Nelson Mandela leads a new armed section of the ANC (African National Congress), formed in response to Sharpeville

1960 Sirimavo Bandaranaike, widow of the assassinated Solomon Bandaranaike, begins the first of three long spells as prime minister of Sri Lanka

1960 Anti-European riots in the Congo cause some 25,000 Belgians to flee the country

1960 US author Harper Lee publishes her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird

1960 Moise Tshombe, taking advantage of chaos in the Congo, declares the independence of Katanga

1960 British and Italian colonies merge as the independent Somali republic, also known as Somalia, with Aden Abdullah Osman as president

1960 The South West Africa People's Organization is founded to fight against South African control of Namibia

1960 Patrice Lumumba becomes prime minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, previously the Belgian Congo

1960 Jean-Luc Godard directs his first feature film, A Bout de Souffle ('Breathless'), a classic of French New Wave cinema

1960 Irish author Edna O'Brien publishes her first novel, The Country Girls

1960 English poet John Betjeman publishes his long autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells

1960 The birth control pill wins FDA approval in the US and goes on sale

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1960 Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail is the first of many collections of poems by US poet Charles Bukowski

1960 The Quiet Revolution in Quebec begins with the election of Jean Lesage and the Liberals

1960 Madagascar becomes independent (under the name Malagasy republic from till 1975), with Philibert Tsiranana as president

1960 French Sudan becomes independent as the republic of Mali, with Modibo Keita as president

1960 The Brazilian government moves to Brasilia, into public buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer

1960 Aung San's widow, Ma Khin Kyi, moves with her children to Delhi, as Burma's ambassador to India

1960 Italian film director Federico Fellini makes , an episodic study of life along the Via Veneto in Rome

1960 The Colossus is US author Sylvia Plath's first collection of poems

1960 20-year-old Spanish tenor Placido Domingo sings his first major role, as Alfredo in in the Mexican city of Monterrey

1960 US jazz saxophonist John Coltrane forms his own 'hard bop' group

1960 Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, discovered in Buenos Aires, is kidnapped by Israeli agents

1960 Cyprus becomes an independent nation, free of British colonial rule, with Archbishop Makarios as president

1960 EFTA (European Free Trade Association) brings together the European nations outside the EEC

1960 Soviet forces shoot down a US high-altitude U-2 spy plane and capture the pilot, Gary Powers

1960 Guatemala is terrorized by government-linked death squads and emergent guerrilla groups

1960 Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni makes L'Avventura, with Monica Vitti in the leading role

1960 A Liverpool group of musicians call themselves Long John & the Silver Beatles – a name soon shortened to something more memorable

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1960 French Togo becomes independent as the republic of Togo, with Sylvanus Olympio as president

1960 French choreographer Maurice Béjart is the first director of Belgium's new Ballet of the 20th Century

1960 South African police fire on a crowd in Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, killing more than sixty people

1960 Kenneth Kaunda is elected president of UNIP, a new party fighting for an independent Northern Rhodesia

1960 US film director Jules Dassin makes Never on Sunday, starring the Greek actress Melina Mercouri

1960 French Cameroun becomes independent as the republic of Cameroun, with Ahmadou Ahidjo as the first president

1960 UK prime minister Harold Macmillan, in Cape Town, warns the white settlers of Africa that 'the wind of change' is blowing through their continent

1959 Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum opens in New York after seventeen years of work on the project

1959 William Gibson's play The Miracle Worker dramatizes the extraordinary story of and Anne Sullivan

1959 Billy Wright becomes the first football player to win 100 caps for England

1959 British author Laurie Lee remembers a Cotswold boyhood in Cider with Rosie

1959 Philip Roth publishes his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five short stories

1959 Australian Grand Prix driver Jack Brabham wins the first of his three Formula One titles

1959 Rwanda suffers the first nationwide outbreak of Hutu violence against Tutsis

1959 Harold Pinter's second play in London's West End, The Caretaker, immediately brings him an international reputation

1959 US author William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, an account of the horrors of a junkie's life, is published in Paris

1959 The St Lawrence Seaway, a joint Canadian and US project, links the Great Lakes and the sea

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1959 Soviet spacecraft Luna 3, passing by the moon at a distance of some 40,000 miles, is able to photograph the far side

1959 , appointed colonial secretary in Macmillan's new government, intends to speed up the independence of British colonies

1959 The Conservative party wins the UK general election with their highest ever vote and an increased majority

1959 A group of dancers leave the Netherlands Ballet and establish their own Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague

1959 Solomon Bandaranaike is assassinated by a Buddhist after only three years as prime minister of Sri Lanka

1959 Asterix, written by René Goscinny and drawn by Albert Uderzo, makes his first appearance, in the French magazine Pilote

1959 Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 successfully strikes the moon, in the Palus Putredinus region

1959 Hawaii becomes the 50th state of the USA

1959 Keith Waterhouse has a wide success with his second novel, Billy Liar

1959 West Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott founds the Trinidad Theatre Workshop

1959 Hiroshima Mon Amour is French director Alain Resnais' first feature film, with screenplay by Marguerite Duras

1959 Achmed Sukarno assumes dictatorial powers, operating an Indonesian policy officially known as Guided Democracy

1959 The first prototype of the Hovercraft, designed by British engineer Christopher Cockerell, crosses the English Channel

1959 After nearly a century as a museum, the Orangery reverts to citrus cultivation before taking on its current role as Kew Gardens' main refreshment building.

1959 ETA (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna) is formed in Spain as a guerrilla organization to win Basque independence

1959 The Transkei becomes the first African homeland, or Bantustan, within South Africa

1959 On the retirement of de Valera, Sean Lemass succeeds him as leader of Fianna F´il and prime minister of Ireland

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1959 Saul Bellow publishes Henderson the Rain King, in which an American millionaire acquires a strange role in an African tribe

1959 Billy Wilder directs Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot

1959 Lee Kuan Yew becomes the first prime minister of the newly independent state of Singapore

1959 The Mini is launched, designed by Alec Issigonis, and becomes the best-selling British car of all time

1959 Vice-president Richard Nixon engages in a '' with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev at a US exhibition in Moscow

1959 Mary Leakey finds in the Olduvai Gorge the first specimen of a new hominid species, now known as Australopithecus Boisei

1959 Liu Shaoqi replaces Mao Zedong as China's president after the Great Leap Forward fiasco, but Mao remains Chairman

1959 German novelist Günter Grass has an immediate success with his first novel, The Tin Drum

1959 Alfred Hitchcock directs Cary Grant in North by Northwest

1959 The Dalai Lama escapes from Tibet to India after the Chinese suppression of an armed uprising costing thousands of lives

1959 In the Hola camp, in Kenya, eleven Mau Mau prisoners die from their treatment at the hand of British forces

1959 Australian soprano Joan Sutherland becomes a star overnight with her performance at Covent Garden in Lucia di Lammermoor

1959 Francis Poulenc and collaborate on La Voix Humaine, a concerto for soprano voice and orchestra

1959 Pope John XXIII summons a second Vatican Council

1959 Soviet spacecraft Luna 1 goes into orbit round the sun, between the orbits of Earth and Mars

1959 Alaska becomes the 49th state of the USA

1959 Fidel Castro begins more than four decades of authoritarian rule in Cuba

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1958 Dictator Fulgencio Batista flees from Cuba, leaving Havana open to Fidel Castro and his victorious guerrillas

1958 Charles de Gaulle is elected first President of France's Fifth Republic

1958 Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson complete a skyscraper for Seagram in New York

1958 Angelo Roncalli is elected pope and takes the name John XXIII

1958 Ayub Khan, commander-in-chief of the Pakistani army, replaces Iskander Mirza as president in a bloodless coup

1958 Hendrik Verwoerd become prime minister of South Africa on the death of J.G. Strijdom

1958 The cartoonist Vicky depicts Harold Macmillan as Supermac in London's Evening Standard

1958 Sekou Touré, the first president of Guinea, settles in for twenty-six years of dictatorial rule

1958 Mao Zedong imposes on China a Great Leap Forward, an attempt at industrialization that results in economic chaos and widespread famine

1958 Harold Pinter's first play in London's West End, The Birthday Party, closes in less than a week

1958 Nationalist Kurds in the north of Iraq launch a guerrilla war against the new government in Baghdad

1958 The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is launched in Britain with Bertrand Russell as president

1958 French citizens approve the new constitution proposed by de Gaulle, thus introducing the Fifth Republic

1958 18-year-old British pop singer Cliff Richard has his first hit single with Move It

1958 English author Alan Sillitoe publishes his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

1958 The baseball teams Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants move to California

1958 Polish film director Andrzej Wajda makes Ashes and Diamonds, starring the Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski

1958 Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka's play The Swamp Dwellers is produced in London

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1958 Irish writer Brendan Behan's autobiographical Borstal Boy is published

1958 Truman Capote publishes a short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's, with a bewitching central character, Holly Golightly

1958 John Cranko's version of Romeo and Juliet, to Prokofiev's score, is premiered by La Scala Ballet in Venice

1958 The king of Iraq, Faisal II, is murdered in Baghdad in a coup led by Abdul Karim Qassim

1958 Yasser Arafat and others in Kuwait found Al-Fatah, a secret organization advocating armed resistance against Israel

1958 Paul Newman stars in the film version of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

1958 The new hard-line Hungarian government headed by János Kádár tries and executes

1958 On his second day in power, de Gaulle visits Algiers to confront the settlers with an unwelcome message

1958 The national assembly in Paris grants de Gaulle six months of unrestricted power as president – his condition for returning to government

1958 Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita is published in Paris

1958 The Fire Raisers, by Swiss dramatist Max Frisch, is performed in Zürich

1958 Chicken Soup with Barley begins a trilogy by English playwright Arnold Wesker

1958 French Algerians seize government buildings in Algiers, in a campaign to ensure that Algerian remains French

1958 In The Affluent Society US economist John Kenneth Galbraith criticizes wasteful modern consumerism

1958 Irish dramatist Brendan Behan's play The Hostage is produced in Dublin

1958 A Commonwealth team, led by Vivian Fuchs, completes the first overland crossing of Antarctica

1958 Lynn Seymour creates the first of many roles for MacMillan, dancing the Adolescent in The Burrow

1958 The Venezuelan dictator Marcos Jiménez escapes to the USA with an estimated fortune of $200 million

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1958 Eight members of the United football team die in an air crash when flying back to England from Belgrade via Munich

1958 Egypt and Syria merge as the United Arab Republic (but disengage three years later)

1958 Harold Macmillan's chancellor, Peter Thoneycroft, and his entire treasury team resign when he overrules them on economic policy

1957 Abdul Rahman Putra becomes the first prime minister of independent Malaya

1957 Latvian-Canadian dancer Ludmilla Chiriaeff founds the Grands Canadiens in Montreal

1957 The Russian spacecraft Sputnik II puts into space a living creature, the dog Laika

1957 Oscar Niemeyer is appointed chief architect for his country's new capital, Brasilia

1957 Boris Pasternak's only novel, Doctor Zhivago, is first published in an Italian translation

1957 German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen uses three separate to achieve acoustic space in Gruppen

1957 Christian Dior dies and is followed by Yves St Laurent as head designer at the famous fashion house

1957 Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal wins the Jury Prize at Cannes

1957 Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim create the Broadway musical West Side Story

1957 The success of the USSR in launching Sputnik prompts the establishment of NASA in the USA

1957 The USSR launches Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite

1957 Laurence Olivier brings the music-hall artist Archie Rice vibrantly to life in John Osborne's The Entertainer

1957 English author Stevie Smith publishes her collection of poems Not Waving but Drowning

1957 A country doctor, François Duvalier, is elected president of Haiti on a massive popular vote

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1957 US paratroops enforce desegregation in Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas

1957 English author John Braine publishes his first novel, Room at the Top

1957 David Lean directs William Holden, Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins in The Bridge on the River Kwai

1957 Barbadian cricketer Gary Sobers, playing in Kingston, Jamaica, against Pakistan, makes a record Test score of 365 not out

1957 John Diefenbaker heads a minority government in Canada, ending twenty-two years of Liberal rule

1957 In Syntactic Structures Noam Chomsky proposes the revolutionary theory that humans inherit an innate universal grammar

1957 Harold Macmillan tells a meeting in Bedford that 'most of our people have never had it so good'

1957 Spanish-born Paris designer Cristóbal Balenciaga produces an ostensibly shapeless garment, the 'sack', that greatly excites the world of fashion

1957 The publication of the novel Justine launches Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet

1957 Polish-born British composer Andrzej Panufnik wins an international reputation with his Sinfonia elegiaco

1957 In Voss Australian author Patrick White creates an epic novel about a disastrous attempt to cross the continent

1957 Nikita Khrushchev's position in the Soviet Communist party is secure after the failure of a plot to remove him

1957 Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses and Aaron, incomplete at his death, has its premiere in Zurich

1957 Jack Kerouac publishes a largely autobiographical novel, On the Road, describing his experiences travelling through the US and Mexico

1957 The FNLA is established, with US support, as a guerrilla group to fight for a non- communist independent Angola

1957 Six founding nations (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, West Germany) establish the European Economic Community (EEC)

1957 The Hawk in the Rain is English author Ted Hughes' first volume of poems

1957 Australian artist Arthur Boyd begins his series of paintings about an aboriginal

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stockman, Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste

1957 US novelist Mary McCarthy describes the religious pressures she grew up with in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

1957 At a conference in Bermuda, Macmillan meets Eisenhower and patches up the 'special relationship' after the rift over Suez

1957 Fred Hoyle, William Fowler, and Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge explain stellar nucleosynthesis

1957 US novelist John Cheever publishes The Wapshot Chronicle, depicting a wealthy and eccentric family in Massachusetts

1957 Kwame Nkrumah leads the Gold Coast into independence under a name of historic resonance, Ghana

1957 De Valera takes stringent measures against the IRA and Sinn Fein, detaining activists in an internment camp

1957 French critic Roland Barthes develops in Mythologies the theory of semiotics, relating to signs and symbols

1957 With his Hundred Flowers Campaign ('Let a hundred flowers bloom'), Mao Zedong invites criticism and then locks up the critics

1957 Danish architect Jørn Utzon wins the competition to design Sydney Opera House

1957 resigns as UK prime minister after the fiasco of the , and is succeeded by Harold Macmillan

1956 The ballet Spartacus, with music by Aram Khachaturian, has its premiere in Leningrad

1956 The British queen, Elizabeth II, moves the traditional royal Christmas address from radio to TV

1956 Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected for a second US presidential term, again with Richard Nixon as his vice-president

1956 Communist activist Fidel Castro returns from Mexico to Cuba to organize guerrilla warfare against the Batista regime

1956 The MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) is formed as a guerrilla movement to end Portuguese rule

1956 Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima publishes The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

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1956 18-year-old Australian sprinter Betty Cuthbert wins three gold medals in the Melbourne Olympics, at 100m, 200m and 400m

1956 Melbourne hosts the Olympics, in what becomes known as 'the Friendly Games'

1956 Under international pressure Britain and France agree to a humiliating withdrawal from Suez

1956 The Kremlin imposes János Kádár on as head of a new government

1956 Russian and Warsaw Pact troops invade Hungary to end the uprising and arrest Imre Nagy

1956 The British and French bomb Egyptian airfields, and land troops near Port Said and the Suez canal

1956 Israeli troops invade the Sinai peninsula, a province of Egypt bordering the Suez canal

1956 Confronted by a popular uprising, Communist leaders in Hungary bring back the reformist prime minister Imre Nagy

1956 Students are fired on in Budapest when protesting against repressive Communist policies

1956 Nasser disregards a French and British ultimatum to withdraw from the Suez canal

1956 John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger features in the first season of London's new English Stage Company

1956 Hans Werner Henze's opera The Stag King has its premiere in Berlin

1956 Lawrence Ferlinghetti is prosecuted and acquitted for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl

1956 Eugene O'Neill's searing account of tensions within his own family, Long Day's Journey into Night, has its premiere in Stockholm

1956 Sicilian author Giuseppe de Lampedusa completes his novel The Leopard, but does not live to see it published

1956 Egypt's president nationalizes the Suez canal and wins Soviet finance for his Aswan dam

1956 The USA and Britain withdraw their offer of financial aid for Nasser's Aswan dam

1956 Russian dancer Galina Ulanova proves a sensation on tour in Europe and the USA in her late forties

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1956 The Sadler's Wells Ballet, dancing now at Covent Garden, is renamed the Royal Ballet

1956 Karlheinz Stockhausen's Song of the Children combines electronic sounds and the human voice

1956 Anastasio Somoza is assassinated on a visit to Panama, but the dictatorship of Nicaragua remains in his family

1956 The husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames design a much copied lounge chair and footstool, made of moulded plywood with padded leather cushions

1956 After a plebiscite British Togo is merged with the neighbouring colony of the Gold Coast

1956 The Visit, by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, has its premiere in Zürich

1956 English poet Ted Hughes marries US poet Sylvia Plath

1956 The first true synthesizer is put on the market by RCA Victor

1956 The English Stage Company, founded by George Devine, opens in London's Royal Court Theatre

1956 French Morocco and Spanish Morocco win independence from the two colonial powers

1956 Tunisia wins independence from France, with Habib Bourguiba as prime minister

1956 The musical My Fair Lady, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, opens on Broadway

1956 Jerome Robbins creates the ballet The Concert, to music by Chopin

1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounces Stalin, dead now for three years, at a party congress n the USSR

1956 Brigitte Bardot is directed by her husband Roger Vadim in his first film, And God Created Woman

1956 The Sudan, declining the opportunity of union with Egypt, opts for independence as a separate state

1956 Heartbreak Hotel, Presley's first recording for RCA, goes to the top of all three US charts

1956 Civil war breaks out in Sudan between the Muslim north and the Christian south

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1955 Ruth Ellis, sentenced to death for the murder of an unfaithful lover, is the last woman to be hanged in Britain

1955 British philologist J.R.R. Tolkien publishes the third and final volume of his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings

1955 Edna Everage, created by Australian satirist Barry Humphries, makes her first appearance in a Melbourne revue

1955 Baptist pastor Martin Luther King leads the Montgomery Bus Boycott after Parks is arrested for not giving up her seat to a white man

1955 Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is performed in New York

1955 With US backing, South Vietnam declares itself an independent republic

1955 A military uprising in Argentina forces Perón to resign and go into exile

1955 The first accurate caesium clock is developed at the National Physical Laboratory

1955 Indian director Satyajit Ray makes his first film, Pather Panchali

1955 Archaeologists at Olympia excavate the workshop of the Greek classical sculptor Phidias

1955 British dancer Joan Benesh and her husband Rudolf develop the Benesh system of dance notation

1955 English poet Philip Larkin finds his distinctive voice in his collection The Less Deceived

1955 James Dean is type-cast as the young lead in Rebel without a Cause

1955 Konrad Adenauer negotiates the release of the last 10,000 German prisoners of war held in the USSR

1955 The first Disneyland opens in California, an event watched on television by 90 million Americans

1955 achieves a much delayed return to nationhood after the finally agrees to withdraw from the country

1955 Nasser alarms the west by buying eastern-bloc arms through Czechoslovakia

1955 Milbourne House, seriously damaged in World War II, is restored and divided into two separate dwellings

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1955 Thomas Mann publishes a longer but still incomplete version of his novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

1955 Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American is set in contemporary Vietnam and foresees troubles ahead

1955 Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis forms his own quintet, extending it in 1958 to a sextet

1955 Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens on Broadway

1955 Kingsley Amis and other young writers in Britain become known as Angry Young Men

1955 Russia forms the Warsaw Treaty Organization (or Warsaw Pact) with her east European allies, as a counterbalance to NATO

1955 Canadian pianist Glenn Gould wins international fame with his recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations

1955 The new UK prime minister, Anthony Eden, gives Harold Macmillan the post of foreign secretary

1955 81-year-old Winston Churchill resigns as Britain's prime minister and is succeeded by Anthony Eden

1955 An armed uprising in Morocco persuades France to accept the principle of independence for the colony

1955 Richard Daley begins a powerful and often unscrupulous reign of 22 years as mayor of Chicago

1955 Elia Kazan directs James Dean in East of Eden

1955 Ellaline Terriss, heart-throb of the Edwardian stage and now in her eighties, moves into 1 St Helena Terrace

1955 Swedish director Ingmar Bergman wins international fame with his film Smiles of a Summer Night

1955 Norodom Sihanouk abdicates as king of Cambodia and becomes the country's prime minister

1955 Michael Tippett's first opera, A Midsummer Marriage, has its premiere at Covent Garden

1954 completes the reinforced-concrete pilgrimage church of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp

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1954 Nasser escapes an assassination attempt by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood

1954 Hancock's Half Hour, starring Tony Hancock, begins on BBC radio

1954 William Golding gives a chilling account of schoolboy savagery in his first novel, Lord of the Flies

1954 English author Kingsley Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim, strikes an anti-establishment chord

1954 The Jehovah's Witnesses first convention at Twickenham rugby ground takes place.

1954 William Walton's opera Troilus and Cressida has its premiere at Covent Garden

1954 Gamal Abd al-Nasser mounts another coup, this time against his colleague Mohammed Neguib, to make himself president of Egypt

1954 A radical manifesto and acts of terrorism alert the world to the emergence of the FLN, committed to independence for Algeria

1954 Relations are normalized between West Germany and the USA, France and Britain, ending the postwar period of occupation

1954 Federico Fellini directs La Strada ('The Road'), starring his wife, Giulietta Masina, and Antony Quinn

1954 Churchill moves Harold Macmillan to a new department, as minister of defence

1954 The country's president, Getúlio Vargas, commits suicide when the army in Brazil demands his resignation

1954 Seventeen-year-old English footballer Bobby Charlton begins a 19-year career playing for Manchester United

1954 Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon launches the Unification Church, a mission to unify world Christianity

1954 18-year-old English jockey Lester Piggott wins the first of a record nine Derbys

1954 In an armistice ending the Indochina War, France acknowledges the independence of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

1954 US choreographer Paul Taylor begins a long and fruitful collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg as his set designer

1954 US truck driver Elvis Presley makes his first commercial recordings, for Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee

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1954 19-year-old Françoise Sagan has a major international success with her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse

1954 George Grivas leads a guerrilla movement, EOKA, fighting for Cyprus's independence from Britain and union with Greece

1954 Barn Elms burns down, and its grounds are converted to school playing fields

1954 Anglo-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch publishes her first novel, Under the Net

1954 An invasion of Guatemala from Honduras, with CIA support, brings to power a right- wing military junta

1954 George Cukor directs Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star Is Born

1954 Oxford medical student Roger Bannister runs the first four-minute mile, at the Iffley Road track

1954 The US Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in US schools is illegal

1954 Politician and author Winston Churchill completes his six-volume history The Second World War

1954 The French abandon Vietnam, leaving the country divided at the seventeenth parallel

1954 The Battle of Dien Bien Phu ends with the surrender to the Vietminh of 12,000 French troops

1954 Alfredo Stroessner seizes power in Paraguay, introducing three decades of repressive dictatorship

1954 Hungarian photographer Robert Capa is killed by a land mine in Vietnam

1954 The German firm NSU builds the first working example of the rotary engine invented in 1924 by Felix Wankel

1954 Bill Haley & His Comets record Rock Around the Clock, providing an early classic of US rock and roll

1954 A painting by Graham Sutherland, commissioned for Winston Churchill's 80th birthday, does not meet with the full approval of the sitter or his wife

1954 The term is coined to reflect President Eisenhower's view of how states might fall to Communism

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1954 J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb', is investigated for Communist sympathies and his security clearance is withdrawn

1954 Japanese film director Kurasawa Akira directs The Seven Samurai

1954 Senator McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt is broadcast live for several weeks on US television

1954 Dylan Thomas's 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood, is broadcast on BBC radio, with Richard Burton as narrator

1954 Baseball star Joe Dimaggio marries Marilyn Monroe, but the marriage lasts only a year

1953 Molecular biologists Francis Crick and James Watson announce their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA

1953 Merce Cunningham forms his own company of dancers, initially at Black Mountain College in North Carolina

1953 Secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria is executed by the new Soviet regime

1953 Cambodia wins independence from the colonial power, France

1953 Improved methods of testing prove conclusively that Piltdown Man was constructed by Charles Dawson from a human skull and the jaw of an ape

1953 The Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh is removed from office in an armed coup sponsored by the CIA and Britain's MI6

1953 The first Soviet hydrogen bomb is successfully tested at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan

1953 An armistice ends the Korean War, leaving several million dead and a country divided either side of a military zone along the 38th parallel

1953 Arthur Miller's play The Crucible uses the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the contemporary paranoia of McCarthyism

1953 The two and Nyasaland are merged in the self-governing Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland

1953 Within the year Marilyn Monroe stars in Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire

1953 US golfer Ben Hogan wins the US Open, the US Masters and the British Open in a single year

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1953 Swedish economist Dag Hammarskjöld becomes secretary-general of the United Nations

1953 French actor Jacques Tati directs and stars in the zany comedy Mr Hulot's Holiday

1953 Anglican vicar Chad Varah, using the crypt of a London church, sets up the first branch of what becomes the Samaritans

1953 French composer Olivier Messiaen uses birdsong with piano and orchestra in his Waking of the Birds

1953 South African author Nadine Gordimer publishes her first novel, The Lying Days

1953 US citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sent to the electric chair as convicted spies

1953 Dmitry Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony has its first performance in Leningrad nine months after the death of Stalin

1953 William Wyler directs Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, a beguiling comedy about a princess's romance in Rome

1953 US abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning exhibits his series Women nos I-VI, on which he has been working since 1938

1953 The new queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, is crowned like all her predecessors since 1066 in Westminster Abbey

1953 English composer William Walton writes Orb and Sceptre for the coronation of Elizabeth II

1953 US author James Baldwin publishes his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, set in Harlem

1953 New Zealander Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay stand together on the top of Everest

1953 Alfred Charles Kinsey completes his study of human sexuality with the publication of Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female

1953 Imre Nagy becomes prime minister of Hungary, but is driven out of office two years later by hard-line Communists because of his relative liberalism

1953 US microbiologist Jonas Salk announces the discovery of an effective vaccine against polio

1953 James Bond, agent 007, has a licence to kill in Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale

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1953 Jomo Kenyatta, charged with having organized the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, is sentenced to seven years in prison

1953 Black American Malcolm Little, who has joined the Nation of Islam while in prison, adopts the surname X to symbolize his rejection of his slave name

1953 English author L.P. Hartley sets his novel The Go-Between in the summer of 1900

1953 US architect Louis Kahn makes his reputation with the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven

1953 Fred Zinneman directs Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr and Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity

1953 Elia Kazan directs Marlon Brando in the film On the Waterfront

1953 dies, four days after suffering a stroke

1953 Saul Bellow publishes The Adventures of Augie March, a novel about the experiences of a young Chicago Jew

1953 British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan creates his first ballet, Somnambulism, to music by Stan Kenton

1953 Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot ('En attendant Godot') is first performed in French in Paris

1952 Le Corbusier's completes his most massive modernist development, the Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles

1952 The Modern Jazz Quartet, led by pianist John Lewis, plays in the sophisticated style that becomes known as 'cool jazz'

1952 Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower wins the US presidential election with Richard Nixon as his vice-president

1952 US composer John Cage's 4'33" consists of precisely that number of minutes and seconds of silence

1952 An outbreak of terrorism in Kenya is orchestrated by a secret Kikuyu organization, the Mau Mau

1952 Vaughan Williams bases his seventh symphony, Sinfonia Antartica, on his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic

1952 US clergyman Norman Vincent Peale has a best-seller in The Power of Positive

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Thinking

1952 In his novel East of Eden John Steinbeck develops the biblical theme of Cain and Abel in a family saga set in California

1952 Evelyn Waugh publishes Men at Arms, the first novel in the Sword of Honour trilogy based on his wartime experiences

1952 British scholar Michael Ventris deciphers Linear B, the script of Mycenae, proving it to be an early form of Greek

1952 King Adbullah's grandson Hussein (who was with him when he was assassinated in 1951) becomes king of Jordan

1952 Ahmed Ben Bella forms the Front de Libération National (FLN) to fight for Algerian independence

1952 Eva Perón dies of cancer and achieves the status of a popular saint in Argentina

1952 Albanian missionary Mother Teresa opens the Nirmal Hriday, or Kalighat Home for Dying Destitutes, in Calcutta

1952 A group of officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser depose Egypt's king, Farouk, and send him into exile

1952 The Queen’s Head pub in Mortlake closes

1952 Kwame Nkrumah, recently released from gaol, becomes prime minister of the British colony of the Gold Coast

1952 Grace Kelly has her first starring role in High Noon, with Gary Cooper

1952 Ernest Hemingway publishes The Old Man and the Sea, about an epic struggle between an aged Cuban fisherman and a gigantic marlin

1952 In his first book of Structures, for two pianos, Pierre Boulez provides a classic of serial music

1952 Gene Kelly dances a famous routine with an umbrella in the film Singin' in the Rain

1952 The UK car manufacturers Morris and Austin merge to become the British Motor Corporation

1952 X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, working at King's College in London, photographs DNA

1952 US author Ralph Ellison publishes his first novel, Invisible Man, a Kafkaesque account of a black immigrant's life in New York

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1952 A left-wing coup brings Paz Estenssoro to power and launches a 12-year revolution in Bolivia

1952 French economist Jean Monnet becomes the first president of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)

1952 A decision by the United Nations makes Eritrea an autonomous federal province within Ethiopia

1952 US boxer Rocky Marciano becomes world heavyweight champion, defeating 'Jersey Joe' Walcott

1952 Hans Werner Henze's first full-length opera, Boulevard Solitude, has its premiere in Hanover

1952 George VI dies and is succeeded by his elder daughter as Elizabeth II

1951 Henri Matisse completes the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, with every detail designed by himself

1951 Libya wins independence from Italy, as a kingdom with Idris I as head of state

1951 Argentinian driver Juan Manuel Fangio wins the first of five Grand Prix world championship titles

1951 The first hydrogen bomb is successfully tested by the US at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands

1951 The cult of Chairman Mao is officially encouraged in China, partly through steady publication of his works

1951 Appointed minister of housing in Churchill's new government, Harold Macmillan soon achieves the ambitious target of building 300,000 houses a year

1951 Labour loses the general election and Winston Churchill returns to Downing Street as prime minister

1951 Japanese film director Kurosawa Akira makes an international reputation with Rashomon

1951 British art historian Nikolaus Pevsner undertakes a massive task, a county-by- county description of The Buildings of England

1951 The Rake's Progress, with music by Igor Stravinsky and libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, has its premiere in Venice

1951 John Huston directs Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in The African

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Queen, based on a C.S. Forester story

1951 US novelist Carson McCullers publishes a collection of stories, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe &eacaute;

1951 King Abdullah of Jordan is assassinated on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

1951 A Question of Upbringing begins Antony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time'

1951 The Batllistas, followers in Uruguay of José Batlle, attempt an unusual experiment in the reform of government

1951 British-Canadian choreographer Celia Franca founds the National Ballet of Canada

1951 In Christ of St John of the Cross Salvador Dali paints an image of the crucified Christ seeming to fly on his cross

1951 British author John Wyndham creates a dark fantasy in his novel The Day of the Triffids

1951 UN and Chinese forces reach a stalemate in Korea, facing each other from fixed positions on either side of the 38th Parallel

1951 Catcher in the Rye is US author J.D. Salinger's immensely successful first novel

1951 Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner open on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I

1951 British architects Arnold Powell and John Moya design the Skylon as a central feature for the Festival of Britain

1951 The Festival of Britain, on the south bank of the Thames in London, celebrates the end of wartime austerity

1951 An agreement is signed by which a joint Tibetan-Chinese authority will nominally govern Tibet

1951 The British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean escape to the Soviet Union just ahead of their detection and arrest

1951 German-born US philosopher Hannah Arendt links Hitler's and Stalin's regimes in The Origins of

1951 The new Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, passes the Oil Act, seizing Britain's assets in the region

1951 Six European nations agree to joint coal and steel production through the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)

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1951 Syntex, a small chemical company in Mexico City, develops the first oral contraceptive

1951 Elia Kazan directs Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in the film of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire

1951 Jacopo Arbenz, newly elected president of Guatemala, enrages the USA by expropriating the land of the United Fruit Company

1951 The Twenty-Second Amendment to the US Constitution prevents anyone being elected for more than two presidential terms

1951 US boxer Sugar Ray Robinson beats Jake Lamotta to take the middleweight title (for the first of five times)

1950 Le Corbusier begins a 15-year project designing Chandigarh as a new joint capital for Punjab and Hariyana

1950 The Medical Research Council in Britain produces a report, by Austin Hill and Richard Doll, linking smoking and lung cancer

1950 Incursions by UN troops far into North Korea give China the pretext to enter the war

1950 UN troops push north across the 38th parallel in a major Korean counter-offensive

1950 The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda publishes his epic account of South America and its people, Canto general

1950 Kirsten Flagstad sings the posthumous premiere, in London, of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs

1950 The British government bans hereditary ruler Seretse Khama from Bechuanaland because he has married a white woman

1950 Soweto begins to be built outside Johannesburg to segregate the city's black labour force

1950 UN troops are sent to defend South Korea, as the invasion from the north rolls on

1950 North Korean forces press far enough south to capture the South Korean capital of Seoul

1950 North Korean troops cross the 38th parallel to invade the southern half of the region

1950 Julius Rosenberg is arrested on suspicion of being a Soviet spy, and his wife Ethel is arrested a few weeks later

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1950 Chinese troops move into Tibet, meeting little resistance

1950 US sociologist David Riesman analyzes the American character in The Lonely Crowd

1950 The Canadian schooner St Roch becomes the first ship to travel through the Panama Canal and the Northwest Passage, thus circumnavigating North America

1950 British author Doris Lessing publishes her first novel, The Grass is Singing

1950 Anton Dolin and Alicia Markova form the Festival Ballet, in time for next year's Festival of Britain

1950 C.S. Lewis gives the first glimpse of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

1950 The Family Moskat, about a Jewish family in Warsaw, is the first of Isaac Bashevis Singer's books to be published in English

1950 A prehistoric victim of strangling is found in Tollund Moss in Denmark, with part of the noose still round his neck

1950 US evangelist Billy Graham forms the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to take the Christian message to the world

1950 A witch hunt begins when Senator Joseph McCarthy says he knows the names of 205 Communists in the US State Department

1950 In response to the Soviet atom bomb, President Truman announces a crash programme to develop a hydrogen bomb

1950 French dramatist Eugène Ionesco's play The Bald Prima Donna launches the Theatre of the Absurd

1950 US state department official Alger Hiss is sentenced to a five-year prison sentence, after being convicted of perjury in a second trial

1949 May 30 The USSR grants nominal independence to east Germany as the newly established German Democratic Republic

1949 May 25 The Federal Republic of Germany is formed from the British, French and US zones of occupation

1949 May 12 The Soviet Union lifts the blockade on Berlin and the airlift ends, after providing for nearly a year a lifeline to the city

1949 George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel set in a terrifying totalitarian state of the future, watched over by Big Brother

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1949 Batavia reverts to its original name of Jakarta and becomes the capital of Indonesia

1949 The Dutch concede independence for Indonesia with Achmed Sukarno as president

1949 Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) sets up a new Republic of China in Taiwan, vowing to recapture the rest of the nation in due course

1949 Robert Menzies returns as Australia's prime minister, and remains in the post for an unbroken sixteen years

1949 The technique of radiocarbon dating is developed by US chemist Willard Libby

1949 The British government declares that northern Ireland will remain British unless the parliament in Stormont decides otherwise

1949 Mao Zedong's long-standing ally heads both the home and foreign departments of the new republic

1949 Mao Zedong, standing on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, proclaims the new People's Republic of China

1949 Eire is renamed the republic of Ireland and withdraws from the Commonwealth, severing the last link with the British crown

1949 The world's first commercial jet airliner, the Comet, designed by de Havilland, goes into service with BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation)

1949 British atomic physicist Klaus Fuchs is discovered to be a Soviet agent, passing nuclear secrets to the USSR

1949 French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss publishes Elementary Structures of Kinship

1949 Enid Blyton introduces her most successful character, Noddy, a small boy who can't avoid nodding when he speaks

1949 Carol Reed directs The Third Man, starring Orson Welles and written by Graham Greene

1949 Bertolt Brecht establishes a new theatrical company, the Berliner Ensemble, in East Germany

1949 French author Simone de Beauvoir publishes The Second Sex, a widely influential feminist polemic

1949 The Christian Democrats win the first elections in Germany since 1933, and Konrad Adenauer becomes chancellor of West Germany

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1949 Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munchin star as three US sailors on shore leave in the screen version of On the Town

1949 Karl von Frisch demonstrates that bees make use of the polarized light of the sun to calculate direction

1949 The first Soviet atomic bomb, called by the Americans Joe One, is successfully tested in Kazakhstan

1949 Ealing Studios produce a film of 's 1947 novel Whisky Galore, about an alcoholic windfall on the island of

1949 Radical young members, including Nelson Mandela, take control of the ANC

1949 Exceptional Scythian remains are found in frozen burial mounds at Pazyryk, in the Altai region of Siberia

1949 US architect Philip Johnson builds the Glass House in in the International Style

1949 The musical South Pacific, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, opens on Broadway

1949 Death of a Salesman, by US playwright Arthur Miller, has its first performance in New York

1949 Annie Allen, by US author Gwendolyn Brooks, describes in narrative verse the life of a black girl in contemporary USA

1949 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is set up by the USA and Canada, together with Britain and other European countries, for purposes of collective security

1949 Jordan occupies the West Bank area of Palestine af the end of the Arab-Israeli war

1949 Newfoundland joins Canada as its tenth province, completing the Confederation

1949 French ex-convict Jean Genet begins his literary career with an autobiographical Thief's Journal

1949 Egypt controls the Gaza Strip area of Palestine at the end of the Arab-Israeli war

1949 Roland Petit's ballet Carmen, starring himself and his wife Zizi Jeanmaire, is a sensation at its London premiere

1949 Defeated by the Communists, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) resigns before the final collapse of his regime

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1949 The first Indo-Pakistani war ends with a Kashmir demarcation line approved by the UN but acceptable to neither state

1948 December 23 Japanese premier Tojo Hideki is convicted in the Tokyo war crimes trial and is hanged

1948 June 26 The Western powers respond to the Soviet blockade by launching the Berlin airlift, flying in necessary provisions of every kind

1948 June 24 The Soviet Union imposes a blockade on Berlin by denying the other powers access through the land corridor to the city

1948 Frederick Ashton's , to music by Prokofiev, is the first full-length ballet by an English choreographer

1948 Olivier Messiaen completes Turangaîlila-symphonie, a symphony in ten movements for an orchestra including ondes martenot

1948 The Muslim Brotherhood carries out acts of terrorism against the Egyptian authorities and British troops

1948 Prime minister Ben Chifley sees Australia's first mass-produced car, the Holden, roll off the production line

1948 US president Harry S. Truman wins election to the office in his own right

1948 Louis St-Laurent succeeds Mackenzie King as Liberal leader and prime minister of Canada

1948 French composer Pierre Schaeffer writes the first pieces of musique concrète, and coins the term

1948 A nine-year civil war begins in Colombia, bringing eventually some 200,000 deaths

1948 Ham House is donated by Sir Lyonel Tollemache and his son to the National Trust

1948 Donald Bradman retires from Test cricket with a tantalizing career average of 99.94 runs

1948 Jewish terrorists, opposed to the partition of Palestine, murder the UN peacemaker Folke Bernadotte

1948 The UN mediator in Palestine, Folke Bernadotte, proposes a peace plan involving the partition of Palestine

1948 700,000 Palestinian Arabs flee from their homes in Israel and become refugees

1948 Kim Il Sung becomes prime minister of North Korea on the withdrawal of the Soviet

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occupying force

1948 Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier introduces the Modulor, an architectural unit based on the Golden Section

1948 US psychologist B.F. Skinner trains laboratory rats to use their brains in his 'Skinnner box'

1948 Daniel Malan moves swiftly to reinforce apartheid, South Africa's already existing system of racial segregation

1948 In their manifesto Refus global fifteen artists and authors attack the values of conservative Quebec

1948 Ballerina Mikiko Matsuyama and her husband establish a family-run balllet company in Tokyo

1948 US lawyer Alger Hiss is denounced, controversially, as a Soviet spy

1948 The National Health Service comes into effect in Britain, providing free medical, dental and hospital services for the entire population

1948 Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears together establish an annual festival in the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh

1948 The World Council of Churches is established in – a significant step in the ecumenical movement

1948 Tito accepts Marshall Aid from the USA, setting Yugoslavia on the path of non- alignment in the Cold War

1948 A 200- telescope goes into service at the Mount Palomar Observatory in California

1948 John Huston directs Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a film based on B. Traven's novel of 1927

1948 British astronomer Fred Hoyle puts forward a 'steady-state' theory of the universe, in which matter is continually created

1948 Richard Strauss completes his Four Last Songs in the year before his death

1948 Daniel Malan becomes South Africa's prime minister after his National Party wins the general election

1948 George Marshall, the US secretary of state, launches a plan to distribute aid to sixteen European countries

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1948 's New York City Ballet becomes the resident company in the City Center for Music and Drama

1948 Vittorio de Sica directs the film Bicycle Thieves, a classic of Italian neorealism

1948 The first West Indian immigrants to Britain arive from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush

1948 In the title of a new book US mathematician Norbert Wiener popularizes a term that he has coined, Cybernetics

1948 Christopher Fry's verse drama The Lady's Not For Burning engages in high-spirited poetic word play

1948 US novelist and poet Jack Kerouac coins a term for his contemporaries, the Beat Generation

1948 Ezra Pound publishes Pisan Cantos, about his postwar imprisonment in an American detention centre near Pisa

1948 Six Arab states attack Israel in support of the Palestinians, starting the first Arab- Israeli war

1948 Israel declares its independence as a new Jewish state, with David Ben-Gurion as prime minister

1948 The Morris Minor is launched, designed by Alec Issigonis, and becomes one of Britain's best-selling cars

1948 U Saw, a political rival of Aung San in Burma, is hanged for having plotted his assassination

1948 Australia, aiming for a 2% population increase each year, takes steps to encourage European immigration

1948 British dancer Robert Helpmann choreographs the ballet scenes in the film The Red Shoes, featuring Moira Shearer

1948 US poet Theodore Roethke publishes The Lost Son, his second collection

1948 Norman Mailer has immediate succes with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, based on his military service in the Pacific

1948 The Cello Sonata by US composer Elliott Carter introduces 'metric modulation'

1948 The British government advertises in Jamaica for people to come and work in Britain

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1948 An armed coup, led by Klement Gottwald, imposes single-party Communist rule in Czechoslovakia

1948 US zoologist Alfred Charles Kinsey publishes some unexpected findings in his Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male

1948 Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated at a Delhi prayer meeting by a Hindu extremist, Nathuram Godse

1947 The first transistor is produced in the Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey

1947 An Arab boy, herding goats in the Qumran desert, finds the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls

1947 Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife Madeleine Renaud establish their own company at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris

1947 Stafford Cripps becomes Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer in the Attlee government

1947 The UN puts forward a plan for the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states

1947 The Cassel Foundation (founded by Sir Ernest Cassel, grandfather of the Countess Mountbatten) establishes the Cassel Hospital for functional nervous disorders at Ham Common

1947 Violent sectarian division in Kashmir results in war between India and Pakistan in support of the rival sides

1947 Italian author Primo Levi publishes If This Is a Man, based on his experiences in Auschwitz

1947 Muslims proclaim an independent state in west Kashmir, defying the wishes of the maharaja

1947 US artist Jackson Pollock's drip paintings cause a stir in New York

1947 French designer Christian Dior introduces the 'New Look', a lavish feminine style of dress welcomed by all after wartime austerity

1947 Baseball-player Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American in a major league team

1947 J.B. Priestley challenges audiences with An Inspector Calls, a play in which moral guilt spreads like an infection

1947 Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah becomes the first governor-general of the new

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state of Pakistan

1947 Jawaharlal Nehru becomes prime minister of the newly independent republic of India

1947 Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, becomes also the first governor-general

1947 In granting independence to India, Britain partitions the subcontinent along sectarian lines into Pakistan and the republic of India

1947 33-year old Aung San, prime minister of Burma, and six of his ministers are assassinated during a cabinet meeting

1947 Parliament Mews is built on the site of Cromwell House, with the original high boundary walls still in place around the Mews

1947 Saxophonist 'Bird' Parker forms his own quintet in New York, often to be heard at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem

1947 Hungarian-born British engineer Dennis Gabor creates the first three-dimensional image from reflected light, subsequently known as a hologram

1947 Marlon Brando stars on Broadway in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar named Desire

1947 Bertolt Brecht's play The Life of Galileo has its premiere in Los Angeles with Charles Laughton in the lead

1947 Thor Heyerdahl sets sail across the Pacific from Peru in a balsa wood boat, the Kon-Tiki

1947 Francis Poulenc makes an opera of Guillaume Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Tirésias ('The Breasts of ')

1947 President Truman defines postwar US policy by pledging support for any nation defending itself against Communism

1947 Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti begins to develop his characteristic style of tense elongated bronze sculpture

1947 Capa, Cartier-Bresson and others found Magnum, a cooperative of leading photographers running their own picture agency

1947 The US Congress passes a National Security Act, setting up the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

1947 English author and alcoholic Malcolm Lowry publishes an autobiographical novel, Under the Volcano

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1947 US scientist Edwin Land demonstrates a new device, the Polaroid camera, to the Optical Society of America

1947 Peacetime conscription, known as national service, is introduced in Britain for all 18- year-old males

1947 An election campaign in Poland, marked by violence and the use of terror, brings a Communist landslide

1946 December John D. Rockefeller Jr. gives land along the East River in New York for a permanent United Nations headquarters

1946 October 15 Hermann Goering, sentenced to death at Nuremberg, kills himself with a potassium cyanide capsule the night before he is due to be hanged

1946 October 1 Twelve of the defendants at Nuremberg are sentenced to death by hanging

1946 April 18 The discredited League of Nations is finally disbanded

1946 March 27 Twenty-five Japanese defendants are put on trial in Tokyo, charged with war crimes

1946 March 5 Winston Churchill, in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, expresses the harsh truth that an has descended across Europe

1946 January 5 William Joyce, widely known as Lord Haw-Haw, is hanged by the British as a traitor

1946 January I The Japanese emperor Hirohito renounces his traditional divine status and declares that he is mortal

1946 British conductor Thomas Beecham founds the third orchestra of his career, calling it the Royal Philharmonic

1946 Titus Groan begins British author Mervyn Peake's trilogy of gothic novels

1946 Rationing in Britain gets worse rather than better, with bread and potatoes now added to the list

1946 The Indochina War breaks out in Vietnam between the French colonial forces and the Vietminh

1946 German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler is acquitted of the charge of collaborating with the Nazis

1946 Germany's former foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, is sentenced to death at Nuremberg and is hanged

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1946-2001 All Saints is used variously for worship by the Anglican and the Greek Orthodox Church, and as a recording studio

1946 Benjamin Britten bases his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra on a theme by Purcell

1946 US poet Elizabeth Bishop publishes her first collection of poems, North and South

1946 Ezra Pound, charged with treason for his wartime broadcasts, begins twelve years in a US hospital for the criminally insane

1946 ENIAC is the world's first general-purpose electronic calculator

1946 Communist leader Enver Hoxha begins nearly 40 years as dictator of Albania

1946 Robert Lowell's second collection, Lord Weary's Castle, contains 'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket' and 'Mr Edwards and the Spider'

1946 Irgun terrorists detonate a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people

1946 Australian painter Sidney Nolan begins a series of paintings on the theme of Ned Kelly

1946 The first of about 20 US tests of atomic and hydrogen bombs is carried out on Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific

1946 The marriage of George Balanchine and Maria Tallchief unites two major stars of the US ballet scene

1946 The National Insurance Act secures state benefits in Britain for the sick, old and unemployed

1946 Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff makes his debut in Puccini's La Bohème in Reggio Calabria

1946 Victor Emmanuel III abdicates in favour of his son a month before a referendum on the Italian monarchy

1946 Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, set in a down-and-out bar of the kind he had known in his youth, is performed in New York

1946 US pediatrician Benjamin Spock recommends a permissive approach in his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care

1946 A new style of American painting, involving artists such as Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, is given the name Abstract Expressionism

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1946 The Communists become the largest party in Czechoslovakia, winning 38% of the vote in a free election

1946 Sonatine, for flute and piano, brings early success to French composer Pierre Boulez

1946 David Lean directs Trevor Howard and and Celia Johnson in Noel Coward's Brief Encounter

1946 Frederick Ashton choreographs Symphonic Variations, to music by César Franck

1946 Aung San's party, the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, wins a landslide victory in the Burmese election

1946 Syria becomes fully independent with the withdrawal of French forces

1946 Howard Hawks directs Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep

1946 Eudora Welty sets her novel Delta Wedding in a contemporary southern plantation

1946 The takeover of the launches an extensive programme of nationalization by the Attlee government

1946 Perón, with the orchestrated support of gangs of thugs, is elected president of Argentina

1946 Sadler's Wells Ballet moves to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden (and is known from 1956 as the Royal Ballet)

1946 Sergei Eisenstein completes Part 2 of his intended epic film trilogy Ivan the Terrible

1945 Richard Wright publishes Black Boy, an account of his early life in Mississippi and then Chicago

1945 In George Orwell's fable Animal Farm a ruthless pig, , controls the farmyard using the techniques of Stalin

1945 Evelyn Waugh publishes Brideshead Revisited, a novel about a rich Catholic family in England between the wars

1945 November 20 Twenty-two German defendants are put on trial in Nuremberg, charged with war crimes

1945 October 24 Fifty-one states agree the Charter of the United Nations, thus establishing the UN

1945 October 24 Vidkun Quisling, Fascist president of occupied from 1942, is

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tried and executed for treason

1945 October 15 Vichy leader Pierre Laval, sentenced in a French court as a collaborator, is executed

1945 September Wernher von Braun and his team of scientists are taken to the USA to develop the German V-2 rocket into an intercontinental ballistic missile

1945 [1939-1945] - in addition to 6 million Jews, the Nazi death camps have killed some 400,000 Gypsies and 100,000 'useless defectives'

1945 [1939-1945] - by the end of the war the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis is around 6 million

1945 [1939-1945] - the death toll in World War II, double that of World War I, includes 17 million Russians and 8 million Chinese

1945 September 2 World War II ends officially with the surrender of Japan, formally accepted by Douglas MacArthur

1945 September 2 proclaims the democratic republic of Vietnam, independent of the colonial power, France

1945 August 29 Douglas MacArthur – in his role as Supreme Commander, Allied Powers – is appointed to administer postwar Japan

1945 August 19 With the surrender of the Japanese, Vietminh guerrillas seize the capital of Vietnam, Hanoi

1945 August 15 A death sentence for the 89-year-old Vichy leader Philippe Pétain is commuted by de Gaulle to life imprisonment

1945 August 15 The Allies celebrate V-J Day – victory over Japan and the end of the war

1945 August 14 The emperor Hirohito, on the first occasion that his people have heard his voice, declares on radio that defeat must be accepted

1945 August 12 The Japanese in Korea surrender to the Russians in the north and to the Americans in the south

1945 August 9 A second atom bomb is dropped from a US plane, this time over Nagasaki

1945 The USSR declares war on Japan, two days after an atom bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima

1945 August 6 An atom bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, destroying four square miles of the city and killing 80,000 people

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1945 July 26 Winston Churchill, losing the postwar general election in Britain, has to yield his seat at Potsdam in mid-conference to Clement Attlee

1945 July 26 The British electorate dismisses Winston Churchill, giving the Labour party and Clement Attlee a landslide victory

1945 July 26 The Japanese emperor Hirohito argues the case for surrender but fails to persuade the military

1945 July 17 Truman, Stalin and Churchill meet for a summit conference in Potsdam

1945 July 16 US scientists succeed in exploding an atom bomb at Alamogordo, a test site in the New Mexican desert

1945 July 3 The four Allied powers (USA, UK, France, USSR) provide occupation forces for separate zones of Austria, Germany and Berlin

1945 June 22 After a ferocious three-month battle, Okinawa is in US hands

1945 June 21 The Sudetenland is restored to Czechoslovakia, seven years after its transfer to Germany under the Munich Agreement

1945 May 23 Heinrich Himmler, escaping in disguise, takes poison when he is identified

1945 May 8 World War II ends in Europe on V-E day (Victory in Europe day)

1945 May 7 The unconditional surrender of all German forces is accepted at Eisenhower's headquarters

1945 May 5 The citizens of Prague, and other cities in Czechoslovakia, rise against the Germans as the Red Army approaches from the east

1945 May 4 British general Bernard Montgomery receives the surrender of German forces in the north and west of Europe

1945 May 2 The German general commanding Berlin, Karl Weidling, surrenders the city to the Allies

1945 May 1 In the Berlin bunker, on the day after Hitler's death, Goebbels arranges for his six children to be lethally injected, and himself and his wife to be shot

1945 April 30 Anglo-US Fascist William Joyce ('Lord Haw Haw') makes his final English broadcast from

1945 April 30 Soviet troops storm the Reichstag in the centre of Berlin on the day when Adolf Hitler commits suicide in his bunker below them

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1945 April 30 Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun retire to their marital quarters in the Berlin bunker and commit suicide

1945 April 30 Hitler chooses Admiral Dönitz as his successor and appoints his cabinet

1945 April 29 Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun in his bunker, and holds a champagne reception with Goebbels as the principal guest

1945 April 29 Against Hitler's specific orders, the commander of the German army in Italy surrenders to the Allies

1945 April 28 Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, are shot by partisans and their bodies are hung from a gibbet in Milan

1945 April 25 Soviet armies form a complete circle around Berlin to isolate the city

1945 April 25 American and Soviet troops join up at Torgau, 70 miles south of Berlin

1945 April 15 The British reach Belsen and reveal appalling Nazi atrocities, worse even than at Buchenwald

1945 April 13 Russian forces reach and capture the Austrian capital, Vienna

1945 April 12 A US destroyer is sunk by a baka, a rocket-propelled version of a kamikaze attack

1945 April 12 President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies and is succeeded by his vice- president, Harry Truman

1945 April 11 American troops discover the German concentration camp at Buchenwald

1945 April 6 Thousands of Japanese kamikaze pilots die in massed suicide attacks in defence of the island of Okinawa

1945 April 5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer is executed in a Nazi concentration camp just a month before the end of the war in Europe

1945 April 5 US troops land on the island of Okinawa, only 300 miles from the main islands of Japan

1945 April Adolf Hitler orders a scorched earth policy within Germany, in the path of the advancing Allies

1945 March 27 Aung San's army, now named the Burma National Army, changes sides in a surprise move and attacks the Japanese

1945 March 24 At a cost of 20,000 dead, US marines win full control of the small strategic island of Iwo Jima

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1945 March 23 Montgomery's Twenty-First Army Group crosses the Rhine at several points in the north

1945 March 22 Patton's Third US Army is the first Allied force to cross the Rhine, at Oppenheim, south of Mainz

1945 March 20 William Slim drives the Japanese from and moves on south to take Rangoon

1945 March 9 Napalm, used to bomb a crowded part of Tokyo, creates a firestorm in which 80,000 die

1945 March 7 Tito becomes head of a provisional government in newly liberated Yugoslavia

1945 March 6 The Soviets instal a puppet government in Romania while the fight continues against Germany

1945 March 3 After a four-month siege of the city Douglas MacArthur returns to Manila, from which he was ejected in 1942 by the Japanese

1945 February 19 American marines land on Japanese-occupied Iwo Jima, a volcanic island 650 miles southeast of Tokyo

1945 February 13 The Germans surrender Budapest to the Soviets after a costly siege

1945 February 13 British bombers launch a devastating raid against Dresden, killing tens of thousands in a firestorm

1945 February 11 Stalin, at Yalta, promises free elections in post-war eastern Europe

1945 February 13 Stalin agrees at Yalta to declare war on Japan after the end of the European war

1945 February 4 Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill meet at Yalta to discuss Allied post-war plans

1945 A new constitution strengthens Tito's hold on Yugoslavia, and is soon followed by repressive measures

1945 A by-election in the safe Conservative seat of Bromley, in London, enables Harold Macmillan to return to the House of Commons

1945 Le Corbusier's use of béton brut (raw concrete) introduces Brutalism

1945 British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin describes the molecular structure of penicillin

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1945 Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov becomes a US citizen

1945 A mass demonstration by trade unions in Buenos Aires results in the release of Perón

1945 Juan Perón, professed friend of the poor in Argentina, is arrested by brother officers

1945 Austrian composer Anton Webern is accidentally killed near Salzburg by a soldier in the US occupation force

1945 Achmed Sukarno makes a unilateral declaration of Indonesian independence, and leads the subsequent struggle against the Dutch

1945 Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, premiered in New York, derives from music written for or inspired by films

1945 Demonstrations in Algeria spark off an uprising against French rule, which is put down with the loss of perhaps 10,000 Muslim lives

1945 Alexander Solzhenitsyn is sentenced to eight years in a Soviet labour camp for critizing Stalin in a private correspondence

1945 In the Labour landslide in Britain's general election Harold Macmillan loses his seat of Stockton-on-Tees

1945 Aung San's daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, is born in Rangoon

1945 Jean-Louis Barrault directs and stars in the film Les Enfants du Paradis

1945 Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes has its premiere in London, at the Sadler's Wells theatre

1945 US dramatist Tennessee Williams has his first success with The Glass Menagerie

1945 Austrian philosopher Karl Popper publishes The Open Society and its Enemies

1945 Maurice 'Rocket' Richard is the first to score 50 goals in a Canadian National Hockey League season

1945 English author Nancy Mitford has her first success with the novel The Pursuit of Love

1945 Harold Macmillan's responsibilties in Yugoslavia involve him, with others, in subsequently controversial decisions about the 'victims of Yalta'

1945 English painter Francis Bacon creates a sensation with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

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1945 Arab countries, gathered for a conference in Cairo, form the Arab League to further their joint interests

1945 Gamal Abdel Nasser and army colleagues form a secret party, the Free Officers, to fight for an independent Egyptian republic

1945 January 27 The Red Army liberates the surviving prisoners at Auschwitz, who include the Italian novelist Primo Levi

1945 January I7 After Soviet troops liberate Hungary, Raoul Wallenberg is abducted and vanishes

1945 January Allied bombing of Berlin forces Hitler to take refuge in his underground bunker

1944 December 26 The Soviet army surrounds the Hungarian capital, Budapest

1944 December 21 With Budapest still in German hands, the Soviets set up a provisional Hungarian government, at Debrecen

1944 December 18 The Germans stage a counter-attack in the Ardennes region before being pushed back in the Battle of the Bulge

1944 December 3 Civil war breaks out in Greece between rival groups of partisans resisting demobilization

1944 November 28 Allied bombs destroy the strategic bridge in Thailand over the River Kwai, built bythe Japanese using prisoners of war as slave labour

1944 November 24 American B-29 bombers take off from the newly captured Saipan on the long trip to bomb Tokyo

1944 November 7 President Roosevelt, although seriously ill, is elected for a fourth term with Harry S. Truman as his vice-president

1944 November Tito and his partisans, with Soviet assistance, liberate Belgrade

1944 October 25 Victory over Japan in a massive 2-day battle at Leyte Gulf assures US recovery of Philippines

1944 October 25 Japanese pilots fly the first of World War II's suicide or kamikaze missions

1944 October 18 Athens is liberated and the Greek government-in-exile returns, with George Papandreou at its head

1944 October 11 Hungary signs an armistice with the USSR

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1944 October 7 Delegates from 39 nations meet at Dumbarton Oaks, near Washington DC, to plan the future United Nations

1944 September 25 7500 British troops, trapped on the far side of the Rhine at Arnhem, are captured by the Germans

1944 September 20 Douglas MacArthur lands US troops on Leyte as the first step in recovering the Philippines

1944 September 8 Bulgaria changes to the Allied side and Communists take control in Sofia

1944 September 8 The first of many thousands of war brides arrive in Canada, mainly from Great Britain

1944 September 8 The first V-2 rocket lands on London, killing three people in Chiswick

1944 September 3 British forces liberate Brussels and on the next day reach Antwerp

1944 September Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, saves thousands of Jews from extermination

1944 August 26 General de Gaulle walks down the Champs Elysées, and then on to Notre Dame, to massive aclaim

1944 August 24 Romania changes sides to fight with the Red Army against Germany

1944 August 24 Tanks of the Second French Armoured Division are the first of the Allies to enter and liberate Paris

1944 August 19 Barricades are built in the streets as Parisians stage an impromptu uprising against the Germans

1944 August 19 George Patton gets a division of his Third US Army across the Seine southeast of Paris

1944 August 15 The Seventh US army, commanded by Alexander Patch, opens another front with a landing on the

1944 August 4 The hiding place in Amsterdam of Anne Frank and her family is discovered by the Gestapo

1944 August 1 Members of the Polish resistance rise against the Germans in Warsaw, in a conflict lasting two months and bringing massive casualties

1944 August The Allied advance in Italy comes to a halt at the Gothic Line of German defences, north of Florence

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1944 from July - more than 5000 Germans, among them Rommel, die because of the Stauffenberg plot

1944 July 25 The Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter-bomber flies into combat, introducing the jet era in aerial warfare

1944 July 20 Adolf Hitler narrowly escapes death from a bomb placed by Claus von Stauffenberg

1944 July 9 American marines win the island of Saipan in the Marianas, bringing Japan within range of US bombers

1944 June 13 The first V-1 flying bombs (or doodlebugs) appear over London, numbering more than 2000 in two weeks

1944 June 10 German troops massacre more than 600 civilians in the French village of Oradour

1944 June 9 Two pre-constructed harbours, known by the code name Mulberries, are towed across the Channel to Normandy

1944 June 6 British general Bernard Montgomery commands the Allied land forces in the Normandy Landing on D-day

1944 June 6 The Allies cross the Channel on D-day for the Normandy invasion

1944 June 4 A multinational Allied force moves fast from Monte Cassino to capture Rome

1944 May 18 After a campaign of four months the monastery at Monte Cassino is captured, by Polish troops

1944 March-June William Slim secures the first Allied victories in the Burma campaign, at Imphal and Kohima in northeast India

1944 March A volunteer force, known as Merrill's Marauders, is commanded by Frank Merrill in US operations against the Japanese in Burma

1944 February 17 US bombers destroy Japanese warships and planes in Operation Hailstone, a radar-guided night attack on the Truk Islands

1944 February After relieving Leningrad, the Russians begin to drive the Germans back on all fronts

1944 January 27 The German siege of Leningrad is finally broken, after 900 days

1944 January 22 In Operation Shingle an Allied force lands at Anzio, on the west coast

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of Italy behind the German lines

1944 January I2 The RAF's first jet, the Gloster Meteor, flies with a Whittle engine

1944 January I0 Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, is sentenced to death at the Verona trials and is executed

1944 January US general Dwight Eisenhower is appointed to command the Allied invasion of Normandy

1944 Churchill extends Harold Macmillan's responsibilities to include developments in Greece and the Balkans

1944 Aaron Copland's ballet Appalachian Spring has choreography by Martha Graham

1944 An uprising in Guatemala brings in a revolutionary junta and a left-wing programme of reform

1944 Laurence Olivier directs and stars in a patriotic film of Henry V with stirring music by William Walton

1944 The separate poems forming T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets are brought together for the first time as a single volume, published in New York

1944 Jorge Luis Borges publishes Fictions, a collection of short stories

1944 Boston writer Robert Lowell publishes his first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness

1944 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor co-stars with a horse in the film National Velvet

1944 Harold Macmillan negotiates with the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, about transition arrangements after Italy's change of side

1944 The World Bank and IMF are conceived at an international conference in the USA, at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire

1944 Fancy Free becomes On the Town, a Broadway musical by Leonard Bernstein, directed by Jerome Robbins

1944 The monastery and town of Monte Cassino are left in ruins after the Allies finally break through the German defences

1944 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Buchenwald, writes his Letters and Papers from Prison

1944 Composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins work together on the ballet Fancy Free

1944 Saul Bellow publishes his first novel, Dangling Man, a study of an intellectual adrift

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as he waits to be drafted into the army

1944 Commissioned by a church in Northampton to sculpt a Madonna and Child, British sculptor Henry Moore produces the first of his family groups

1944 Ibn Saud and his US partners set up ARAMCO, the Arabia-American Oil Company

1943 Colossus Mark I, the world's first computer, goes into decoding service at Bletchley Park in Britain

1943 December Carl ('Tooey') Spaatz is appointed to command the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe

1943 November Mussolini becomes Hitler's puppet ruler of a new Fascist republic in north Italy

1943 November The Germans halt the Allied advance along the Gustav Line, which includes Monte Cassino

1943 October 24 Subhash Chandra Bose, as leader of the Indian National Army, declares war on Britain

1943 October 13 Italy changes sides and declares war on her recent ally, Germany

1943 October 1 The Allies move north from Salerno and capture Naples

1943 October British general William Slim is appointed to command the Fourteenth Army, formed specifically for the campaign to recover Burma

1943 October British admiral Louis Mountbatten is appointed to head the new Southeast Asia Command, with his headquarters in Delhi

1943 September 27 A premature uprising against the Germans in Naples results in a massacre of the inhabitants

1943 September 8 Italy, abandoning her Axis partners, surrenders unconditionally to the Allies

1943 September A strong Allied force lands at Salerno, south of Naples

1943 August 23 Allied bombers begin four months of night-time raids on Berlin

1943 August 17 The RAF bomb the German V-2 rocket research station at Peenemünde

1943 August 16 All German and Italian troops are by now driven out of Sicily or captured by the Allies

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1943 August 12 On Hitler's orders, the SS rescue Mussolini from house arrest in the mountains of central Italy

1943 August 8 British general Harold Alexander is appointed commander-in-chief of all Allied forces in the Italian campaign

1943 August 3 Italians signs a secret armistice with the Allies, as Allied troops land in Sicily

1943 July 28 The Hamburg Fire Department coins the word Feuersturm ('firestorm') to describe the unprecedented effects of an RAF raid on the city

1943 July 25 The king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, has Mussolini arrested and appoints in his place a marshal, Pietro Badoglio

1943 July Belsen, used as a prisoner-of-war camp since 1940, is turned into a concentration camp

1943 July 13 Hitler's attempt to take Kursk (in response to Stalingrad) results in the German loss of 70,000 men and 1500 tanks

1943 July 10 British and American troops land in Sicily to begin the Italian campaign

1943 May 16 Two hydroelectric schemes in the Ruhr valley are destroyed by the RAF's Dam Busters and their bouncing bombs in Operation Chastise

1943 May 7 - the Allies capture Tunis, taking 250,000 German and Italian prisoners and winning control of North Africa

1943 May The victory of the Allies in north Africa brings to an end the three-year siege of Malta

1943 April-May The Allied destruction of U-boats climbs to its highest level in the Battle of the Atlantic, with 56 sunk in two months

1943 April 19 Jews in Warsaw resist a fierce German onslaught for a month before their ghetto is finally destroyed

1943 April 19 New Allied successes against the German U-boats provide a turning point in the battle of the Atlantic

1943 April Martin Bormann, previously head of the party secretariat, becomes Hitler's personal secretary

1943 March 20 Mao Zedong becomes official leader of the , as the elected Chairman of the Central Committee and the Politburo

1943 February 9 After a six-month battle, US troops win the Pacific base of Guadalcanal

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from the Japanese

1943 February 9 Orde Wingate and his Chindits launch a guerrilla campaign behind the Japanese lines in Burma

1943 January 31 With much of the German Sixth Army destroyed, the survivors led by Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrender at Stalingrad

1943 January 24 The Casablanca Conference includes the decision to insist on unconditional surrender by the Axis powers

1943 January I2 Roosevelt and Churchill meet in Casablanca for a strategic conference

1943 January Hitler appoints Karl Dönitz as commander of the German navy

1943 Jean-Paul Sartre begins a new career as a dramatist with his first play, The Flies ('Les Mouches')

1943 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is repealed in the US, but there are to be only 105 Chinese immigrants each year

1943 Future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin becomes leader of the underground terrorist group Irgun

1943 The Ba'th party is founded by Michel Aflaq and others in Syria, with a pan-Arab political agenda

1943 Pablo transforms a bicycle's handlebars and saddle into Head of a Bull

1943 British conductor John Barbirolli is appointed to direct the Hallé orchestra

1943 Zoot Suit riots, starting in Los Angeles, target young Mexican Americans

1943 William Tubman begins a 28-year spell as president of Liberia

1943 Basil Brooke begins an unbroken 20-year period in office as Unionist prime minister of northern Ireland

1943 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor co-stars with a collie in Lassie Come Home

1943 Power is seized in Argentina by a new military junta, the Group of United Officers

1943 English contralto Kathleen Ferrier makes her London début in Handel's Messiah in Westminster Abbey

1943 The musical Oklahoma! launches the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

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1943 French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre expounds his theory of existentialism in Being and Nothingness ('L'Être et le néant')

1943 Harold Macmillan reveals his diplomatic skills as a go-between at the Casablanca Conference

1942 December 17 An international declaration condemns Germany's 'bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination'

1942 December 2 The loss of merchant shipping to U-boats reaches a peak in the Battle of the Atlantic, with 1.5 million tons sunk in the last quarter of the year

1942 December 2 Enrico Fermi and his team in Chicago achieve the first nuclear chain reaction

1942 November 27 French crews in Toulon scuttle the fleet to prevent it falling into German hands

1942 November 25 Soviet tanks complete the encirclement of 20 German divisions at Stalingrad

1942 November 12 After three days of resistance the French commanders in north Africa bring their troops over to the Allied side

1942 November 11 Hitler, disregarding the armistice, sends German troops to take control of Vichy France

1942 November 8 American and British forces, under Dwight Eisenhower, land in Morocco and Algeria

1942 November In a few weeks Montgomery and the Eighth Army push Rommel back some 1200 miles, into Tunisia

1942 October 23 Montgomery launches the second battle of El Alamein against Rommel

1942 October 3 The German V-2 rocket is successfully tested by Wernher von Braun and his team at Peenemünde

1942 September 13 A desperate battle begins for the city of Stalingrad, with house-to- house fighting between Germans and Russians

1942 August 30 Rommel's new thrust towards Alexandria is halted by the British at Alam al-Halfa, a ridge near El Alamein

1942 August 19 Canadian troops provide most of the assault force in a disastrous raid on Dieppe

1942 August 13 Bernard Montgomery is appointed commander of the demoralized

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British and Commonwealth Eighth Army in North Africa

1942 August 7 US and Japanese forces begin a violent six-month struggle for Guadalcanal, one of the Solomon Islands

1942 August US general Dwight Eisenhower is appointed to command Allied landings in north Africa

1942 July 4 Auchinleck finally stops Rommel's advance, in the first battle of El Alamein

1942 July Russia's new heavy industry is relocated to the east to escape the German advance

1942 July A renewed German campaign eastwards in Russia results in the capture of Sebastopol and the Crimea

1942 July Treblinka is constructed, in Poland, as the Nazis' first large-scale and purpose-built death camp

1942 July Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in an Amsterdam attic

1942 June 21 German general Erwin Rommel captures Tobruk, along with 33,000 British soldiers and valuable supplies

1942 June 9 Hitler orders a massacre at Lidice, a village near Prague, in retaliation for the death of Heydrich

1942 June 7 US planes sink four Japanese aircraft carriers in the battle of Midway, halting for the first time Japan's aggressive expansion

1942 June 7 US physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is appointed director of the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon

1942 May 31 Three Japanese midget submarines penetrate Sydney harbour in Australia

1942 May 27 Reinhard Heydrich is fatally wounded by Free Czech agents parachuted in from Britain

1942 May William Slim gets the remaining British forces back to India from Burma, in a fighting withdrawal that lasts two months

1942 May German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer flies to neutral Sweden to contact the British on behalf of conspirators against Hitler

1942 May Burma becomes the last in the series of important southeast Asian territories to fall into Japanese hands

1942 May After losing the Philippines to the Japanese, Douglas MacArthur declares 'I

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shall return'

1942 April 18 US planes, flying from an aircraft carrier, undertake a difficult bombing raid on Tokyo

1942 April 15 George VI awards the George Cross (for civilian valour) to the entire besieged island of Malta

1942 April Germany launches a bombing campaign specifically targeting historic British cities with three stars in the Baedeker guidebook

1942 April Pierre Laval becomes head of the government in German-backed Vichy France

1942 April British engineer Barnes Wallis designs a bouncing and rotating bomb for use against German dams

1942 March 8 The Japanese invasion of Papua signals the start of the three-year New Guinea campaign

1942 from March German industrial enterprises are moved from the vulnerable Ruhr valley to the slave labour facilities of Auschwitz

1942 March The Nazis build a new style of concentration camp, at Auschwitz in Poland, in which the fit will work and the unfit will be killed

1942 February 19 Japanese aircraft attack Australia, bombing Darwin's harbour and air force base

1942 February 15 Singapore falls to the continuing Japanese onslaught in southeast Asia

1942 February 1 Vidkun Quisling, founder of the Norwegian Fascist party, is appointed president of German-occupied Norway

1942 February Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, is put in charge of Germany's armaments programme

1942 February An Indian National Army is formed among Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese, with the purpose of evicting the British from India

1942 February Joseph Stilwell is appointed to head the US military mission to Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek)

1942 February Arthur Harris is put in charge of British Bomber Command, and is later much criticized for his ruthless approach

1942 January 20 Reinhard Heydrich convenes a meeting at Wannsee to discuss the

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practical details of the 'final solution'

1942 January Before the end of the month the Japanese control the whole of Malaya

1942 January Aung San's Burma Independence Army enters Burma as part of the Japanese invasion

1942 US crooner Bing Crosby sings Irving Berlin's White Christmas

1942 Churchill gives Harold Macmillan an unusual job, negotiating on behalf of the British government in north Africa and reporting directly to Churchill

1942 Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of our Teeth has a mixed reception at its New Haven premiere

1942 English children's author Enid Blyton introduces the Famous Five in Five on a Treasure Island

1942 A rich hoard of Roman silver is unearthed near Mildenhall, in Suffolk

1942 Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star in the first of many films together, Woman of the Year

1942 Early tests of the Dambusters' bouncing bomb are carried out at the National Physical Laboratory's ship tank

1942 James Cagney stars in the screen musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, directed by Michael Curtiz

1942 Michael Curtiz directs Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca

1942 US poet Randall Jarrell publishes his first collection, Blood for a Stranger

1942 US poet Ezra Pound, in Italy during the war, broadcasts Fascist propaganda aimed at the United States

1942 Italian director Luchino Visconti's first film, Obsession, brings neorealism to the cinema

1942 French music student Pierre Boulez joins a harmony class taught by Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire

1942 French author Marguerite Duras makes her name with her partly autobiographical novel The Sea Wall

1942 Mahatma Gandhi and nearly all the leaders of India's Congress party are arrested and will remain in prison until the end of the war

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1942 French author Albert Camus creates an early anti-hero in his novel The Outsider (L'Étranger)

1942 Algerian nationalist Ferhat Abbas produces a manifesto demanding independence from France

1942 Mahatma Gandhi launches the Quit India Movement, calling on a large crowd in Bombay to 'do or die' in the struggle to expel the British

1942 A Jewish girl in Amsterdam, Anne Frank, is given a diary for her thirteenth birthday

1942 David Lean and Noel Coward create a classic wartime film, In Which We Serve about the crew of a naval destroyer

1942 Aaron Copland's ballet Rodeo has choreography by

1942 US choreographer Merce Cunningham begins a long creative partnership with the composer John Cage

1942 Leslie Howard directs and stars in The First of the Few, about the creator of the Spitfire, with music by William Walton

1942 Dmitry Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, mainly written during the siege of Leningrad, has its premiere in Kuybishev

1942 A report by UK economist William Beveridge proposes a wide-ranging social security programme for postwar Britain

1942 Yitzhak Shamir becomes leader of the terrorist Stern gang in Palestine

1942 Harold Macmillan moves to the Colonial Office, as under-secretary

1941 December 28 Burmese politician Aung San raises a Burma Independence Army in Thailand to support the imminent Japanese invasion of his country

1941 December 25 Hong Kong surrenders to an invading Japanese force

1941 December 19 Italian frogmen enter the harbour at Alexandria and cripple two British battleships

1941 December 13 Bulgaria signs the Anti-Comintern Pact and joins the war on Germany's side

1941 December 10 Japanese planes sink the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse off the coast of Malaya

1941 December 8 Within hours of Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft attack the Philippines

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and destroy half the available US planes

1941 December 8 The US Congress declares war on Japan and President Roosevelt endorses the order

1941 December 7 Without warning, 400 Japanese planes attack and destroy US warships at anchor in Pearl Harbor

1941 December 7 In three adapted vans at Chelmno, in western Poland, the Germans begin using poison gas to kill Jews

1941 December 5 The German advance is held just short of Moscow as winter arrives

1941 December Enigma is now being decoded fast enough at Bletchley to give the Allies advance warning of German plans

1941 November 13 The British aircraft carrier Ark Royal is sunk by a U-boat in the Mediterranean

1941 October 16 Adolf Eichmann, in an official letter about policy in relation to the Jews, uses the phrase 'the final solution'

1941 October 16 Japanese emperor Hirohito appoints Tojo Hideki as the country's prime minister

1941 September 27 Patrick Henry, the first of the US Liberty ships, is soon followed by more than 2700 others, built at record speed

1941 September 16 With British and Russian support, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi succeeds his deposed father as shah of Iran

1941 September 8 A week or two after reaching Leningrad a Germany army establishes a siege that will last 900 days

1941 September De Gaulle forms in London the French National Committee, a government in exile in London for the Free French

1941 August 21 The first of the Arctic convoys leaves Scapa Flow, in the north of Scotland, taking Hurricane fighters and raw materials to the Soviet Union

1941 August 14 Roosevelt and Churchill publish a joint Atlantic Charter, foreseeing a future free from 'Nazi tyranny'

1941 August British and USSR troops invade Iran to depose the oil-rich Reza Shah, fearing that he may take the side of the Germans

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1941 August Nazi experiments are carried out on Jews and Soviet prisoners of war to find effective means of murder by gas

1941 July 31 Goering orders Reinhard Heydrich to prepare plans for the 'final solution of the Jewish queston'

1941 July 26 Roosevelt appoints Douglas MacArthur commander of US forces in the Far East

1941 July 16 Less than four weeks after crossing the Russian border, a German army is within 200 miles of Moscow

1941 July Britain's Special Air Service (SAS) is formed for unorthodox guerrilla operations in the north African desert

1941 July The systematic shooting of Russian Jews by German Einsatzgruppen is the first step in the development of the Holocaust

1941 July Churchill appoints Claude Auchinleck as British commander in North Africa and the Middle East

1941 June 27 - the Communist Party of Yugoslavia appoints Tito to head a guerrilla force to resist the recent German invasion of the country

1919 June 22 German armies cross the border to invade Russia on a front from the Baltic to southern Poland

1941 May German forces evict the British from the island of Crete after a week-long battle

1941 May 27 With Iceland as an Allied base, convoys can now be escorted by warships for the entire Atlantic crossing

1941 May 27 Germany's latest battleship, the Bismarck, is sunk in the Atlantic with the loss of nearly all her 2222 crew

1941 May 19 The Vietminh is founded as a guerrilla force to liberate Vietnam from the Japanese, and Ho Chi Minh soon emerges as the leader

1941 May 15 A Gloster E.28/39 air frame becomes the first craft to fly with a Whittle jet engine

1941 May 10 Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy in the Nazi party, flies to Britain on a bizarre secret mission

1941 &nbIsp; May In preparation for the invasion of Russia, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler set up Special Task Commandos (Einsatzkommando) to exterminate Communists and Jews

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1941 April 7-28 German troops move on from Yugoslavia into Greece, driving a small British force from the mainland across the sea to Crete

1941 April 6 German troops invade and rapidly overrun Yugoslavia

1941 April 6 The Allies recover Ethiopia from the Italians and Haile Selassie returns to his throne in Addis Ababa

1941 March 28 The Italian navy, defeated off Cape Matapan, ceases to be a significant factor in the Mediterranean

1941 March 11 Congress passes the Lend-lease Act, enabling President Roosevelt to provide much needed help to US allies

1941 February 3 Adolf Hitler sends Erwin Rommel to save the Italians from looming disaster in north Africa

1941 January 22 Archibald Wavell's Allied divisions, after a rapid desert campaign, drive the Italians from the Libyan port of Tobruk

1941 January 6 President Roosevelt defines to Congress his concept of Four Freedoms – of speech, of worship, from want, from fear

1941 US author Eudora Welty publishes her first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green

1941 British author Rebecca West publishes an account of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

1941 John Huston, for his first film, directs Humphrey Bogart in the third screen adaptation of The Maltese Falcon

1941 Citizen Kane is written, directed and starred in by 26-year-old Orson Welles

1941 Australian prime minister Robert Menzies is forced to resign after losing the confidence of his cabinet

1941 Aung San and some revolutionary colleagues (the Thirty Comrades) receive military training in Japan, aiming to evict the British from Burma

1941 The US army invests in a significant new vehicle, placing an order for 16,000 jeeps

1941 Greek soprano Maria Callas sings her first Tosca, in the opera house in Athens

1941 Henri Matisse, recovering from an operation, develops his technique of gouaches découpées (cut-out patches of painted paper)

1941 Bertolt Brecht's play set in the Thirty Years' War, Mother Courage, has its first

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performance in Zurich

1941 Agee and Evans give a warm personal view of America in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

1941 English composer Michael Tippett completes his oratorio A Child of our Time (not performed until 1944)

1941 Greta Garbo receives terrible reviews for Two Faced Woman, which turns out to be her last film and the beginning of a long retirement

1941 Scott FitzGerald's final and incomplete novel, The Last Tycoon, is published posthumously

1941 British aviator Amy Johnson is reported missing over the Thames estuary when flying on a mission for the Air Ministry

1940s-2000s Grey Court House (now called Newman House) is used first as a nursery school and then as a unit within Greycourt Secondary School

1940 Radnor House is completely destroyed by a bomb, and the site later becomes open to the public as Radnor Gardens.

1940 December 18 Adolf Hitler orders preparations to be made for Operation Barbarossa, his planned invasion of the Soviet Union

1940 November 25 The de Havilland Mosquito, a multi-purpose wooden aeroplane widely used by the RAF in World War II, makes its first flight

1940 November 20 Hungary, Romania and Slovakia sign the Tripartite Pact, joining the war on the German side

1940 November 14-15 Coventry suffers a raid of such intensity that the new technique becomes known as carpet bombing

1940 November 11-12 British aircraft sink three Italian battleships at anchor in Taranto harbour

1940 November 5 F.D. Roosevelt wins an unprecedented third US presidential term, albeit it with a considerably reduced share of the vote

1940 October 31 The castle at Colditz, adapted as a high-security prisoner-of-war camp, receives 140 Polish officers as its first inmates

1940 October28 Italian troops cross the Albanian border in the hope of a blitzkrieg against Greece

1940 October 23 Moscow appoints Tito to head the Communist Party of Yugoslavia

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1940 October 4 Mussolini plans a new Roman empire, reaching like the first one round the entire Mediterranean

1940 October 2 After the summer's losses in the air, Hitler orders the effective cancellation of operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of Britain

1940 October The US government provides 50 destroyers to boost the British escort of convoys in the Atlantic

1940 October President Roosevelt, campaigning for a third term, asssures Americans that he will not send their sons to fight in Europe's war

1940 September 27 Germany, Italy and Japan form a Tripartite Pact as a military alliance

1940 September 7 The first German night-time bombing raid on London signals the start of the Blitz on British cities

1940 August 20 Churchill says of the Battle of Britain pilots that never has so much been owed by so many to so few

1940 August 13 The Battle of Britain reaches its most intense phase, with 1500 German planes involved in a single day's assault

1940 July 16 Hitler orders preparations for the invasion of England, under the codename Operation Sea Lion

1940 July 6 German bombers attack the barracks at Aldershot, in the first aerial raid of what becomes the Battle of Britain

1940 July 3 British warships bombard the French fleet in harbour at Mers-el-Kébir, in Algeria, killing more than 1250 sailors

1940 July Germany takes control of Romania, to secure the country's rich oil fields

1940 July Increased German U-boat activity after the fall of France launches the crucial Battle of the Atlantic

1919 June 26 The British government gives recognition to Charles de Gaulle as official leader of the Free French

1919 June 24 A delegation from France, defeated and partly occupied by Germany, signs in Rome an armistice with Mussolini's Italy

1919 June 22 The armistice leaves France with the southern part of the country, with a new capital at Vichy

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1919 June 22 Adolf Hitler attends the signing of the armistice with France, in the railway carriage used for the armistice after the German defeat in 1918

1919 June 20 Mussolini invades France in the last-minute hope of gaining some territory in the armistice settlement

1940 June 18 Charles de Gaulle broadcasts to the French nation from London, declaring himself the leader of the Free French

1940 June 16 Marshal Pétain, as the new premier of France, immediately asks Germany for an armistice

1940 June 16 Marshal Pétain, French hero from World War I, becomes France's prime minister

1940 June 14 June 14 - a German army takes Paris and pushes on further south into the Rhone valley

1940 June 10 German and Italian planes begin a prolonged assault on the Mediterranean island of Malta

1940 June 10 Mussolini declares war on a France already on the verge of defeat

1940 June 7 The last Allied forces withdraw from Norway, leaving the country entirely in the hands of its German occupiers

1940 June 4 Some 340,000 British and French troops have by now been rescued from Dunkirk, but a million Allied soldiers are now prisoners of the Germans

1940 May 27 The Belgians surrender to the German armies encircling them north and south

1940 May 26 Evacuation begins from Dunkirk, and over the next ten days some 860 vessels ferry troops across the Channel

1940 May 19 German tanks reach the French coast at Abbeville, nine days after crossing the border from Germany

1940 May Fishing smacks and private launches are enlisted from southern England's coasts and rivers for a rescue mission across the Channel

1940 May A German army races west through northern France, aiming to cut off the Allied troops in Belgium

1940 May 14 The Local Defence Volunteers are formed in Britain and are soon given, on Winston Churchill's suggestion, the name Home Guard

1940 May 14 The caretaker government of the Netherlands surrenders to the German

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invaders

1940 May 13 Winston Churchill, in his first speech to the House of Commons as prime minister, offers the nation nothing but 'blood, toil, tears and sweat'

1940 May 1 Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government escape just in time to Britain

1940 May 12 Only two days after crossing the Netherlands border, a German division reaches the coast near Rotterdam

1940 May 11 The French rely on the heavily fortified Maginot Line to keep out the Germans, but they outflank it

1940 May 10 German troops force their way into France through the Ardennes, launching the Battle of France

1940 May 10 After the German invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium, Winston Churchill replaces Chamberlain as the British prime minister

1940 May 10 German tanks cross the borders into neutral Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium

1940 April 10 Allied ships on patrol in the North Sea, soon followed by troops, rush to the defence of Norway

1940 April 9 The German invasion of Norway includes the world's first airborne assault, with troops arriving by plane to attack the airports of Oslo and Stavanger

1940 April 9 German ships and marines occupy the harbours of neutral Denmark and Norway

1940 April 5 Inactivity during the Phoney War prompts to assure the House of Commons that Hitler has 'missed the bus'

1940 from April 4 More than 4000 Polish officers are massacred at Katyń on Stalin's orders

1940 March 12 The Treaty of Moscow ends the war between the USSR and , after 200,000 Soviet deaths in the three months of hostilities

1940 February 16 303 captured merchant seamen are rescued in a daring British raid on the German supply ship Altmark, in use as a floating prison in a Norwegian fjord

1940 January 8 The ration book is introduced in Britain, at first just for bacon, butter and sugar, but soon also for meat, eggs, tea, milk, cheese, jam, and clothing

1940 William Joyce, broadcasting in English from Germany, becomes notorious in Britain as Lord Haw-Haw

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1940 US choreographer Agnes de Mille creates Black Ritual for

1940-45 Elm Lodge, requisitioned by Anti Aircraft Command, along with All Saints, Petersham vicarage and the village institute, plays a key role in wartime operational research on Radar

1940 In To the Finland Station Edmund Wilson discusses the development of socialism and revolution, culminating in Lenin and Trotsky

1940 After his London studio is bombed, Henry Moore moves to Much Hadham, where he works and lives for the rest of his life

1940 Lord Craigavon (previously James Craig) dies in office after nineteen years as northern Ireland's prime minister

1940 US author Carson McCullers publishes her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

1940 All Saints, along with Petersham Vicarage, the village hall and (later) Elm Lodge, is requisitioned by Anti-Aircraft Command and plays a key role in operational research on Radar throughout the Second World War

1940 Working as an official war artist, Henry Moore creates an iconic series of drawings of Londoners sleeping at night in underground stations

1940 Civilian heroism is rewarded in Britain with a new medal, the George Cross

1940 Schoolboys, out hunting, discover paintings in a cave at Lascaux after their dog falls into a hole

1940 An assassin sent by Stalin kills the exiled Trotsky in his home in Mexico City

1940 Charlie Chaplin ridicules Hitler in The Great Dictator, the first film in which he speaks coherent dialogue

1940 John Ford directs Henry Fonda in the film of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

1940 Radar masts along the coasts of Britain give early warning of German air attacks

1940 Winston Churchill gives Harold Macmillan his first ministerial appointment, in the Department of Supply

1940 The Limes is damaged by enemy bombing. Its exterior is subsequently restored to its original appearance, with its interior rebuilt for commercial use

1940 British actors Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier marry

1940 Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is rejected by numerous publishers before

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becoming, decades later, his best-known novel

1940 Avraham Stern forms the Stern Gang, a new Jewish terrorist group in Palestine and an offshoot of Irgun

1940 Ernest Hemingway publishes the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, set in the Spanish Civil War

1940 Gene Kelly makes his name on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey

1940 Bob Hope and Bing Crosby star together in Road to Singapore, the first of a long series of 'Road' films

1940 US author Richard Wright publishes Native Son, his semi-autobiographical novel about racial equality

1940 German novelist Thomas Mann takes US citizenship and in 1941 moves to California

1940 British biologists Ernst Chain and Howard Florey develop penicillin as a safe and useful antibacterial drug

1940 Richard Addinsell writes the Warsaw Concerto as music for the film Dangerous Moonlight

1940 The Conservative Colorados recover power in Paraguay and reimpose military rule

1940 Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen design an 'organic chair' for mass production in moulded plywood and aluminium

1940 Mohammed Ali Jinnah puts forward the concept of independent Muslim states within India

1940 English potter Bernard Leach publishes an influential manual, A Potter's Book

1940 American Ballet Theatre, directed by Lucia Chase and Richard Pleasant, begins its first season in New York

1939 T.S. Eliot gives cats a poetic character in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

1939 December 14 The USSR is expelled from the League of Nations because of the Soviet invasion of Finland

1939 December 13 The German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee is scuttled after a battle with Allied ships near the river Plate

1939 December 6-22 The Finns win spectacular victories in counter-attacks against the

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Russian invaders, destroying four Soviet divisions

1939 December Phoney War, Bore War, drôle de guerre and Sitzkrieg are comments on the lack of military action from any side so far

1939 November 30 Soviet troops cross the borders of Finland, beginning the brief Russo-Finnish War, in keeping with the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

1939 November Adolf Hitler orders the 'mercy killing' of all those with specified categories of infirmity, beginning with newborn babies and young children

1939 October 14 A German U-boat sinks the British battleship Royal Oak at anchor in Scapa Flow

1939 September Nazi murder squads (Einsatzgruppen) kill Poland's elite

1939 September 27 Warsaw falls, after a brave resistance, whereupon Germany and Russia carve up Poland

1939 September 19 Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark jointly declare their neutrality

1939 September 17 A Russian army invades Poland from the east, fulfilling the secret protocol of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact

1939 September 17 A German U-boat sinks the British aircraft carrier Courageous off the coast of Ireland

1939 September 4 Jan Smuts brings South Africa into the war in support of Britain

1939 September 4 Jan Smuts defeats J.B.M. Hertzog in a vote on neutrality, and takes Hertzog's place as South African premier

1939 September Alan Turing joins the code-breaking team working on Enigma at Bletchley Park

1939 In spite of the Axis agreement of 1936, Mussolini declines to bring Italy into the war on Hitler's side

1939 A British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of about 150,000 infantry crosses the Channel to help defend France's border with Belgium

1939 French troops rush to defend France's border with Germany, along the heavily fortified Maginot Line

1939 The new German technique of blitzkrieg ('lightning war') is demonstrated with devastating effect against Poland

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1939 September 3 On the very first day of the war a U-boat sinks a British liner, the Athenia, with the loss of 112 civilian lives

1939 September 3 Britain and France, receiving no answer from Hitler to their ultimatum over his attack on Poland, declare war on Germany

1939 September 1 George Marshall becomes US Army chief of staff, a post he retains to the end of World War II

1939 September 1 Spain and Portugal declare that they will maintain their neutrality in the European war that now seems inevitable

1939 September 1 Adolf Hitler launches a massive attack on Poland, with tanks crossing the border and air raids on Warsaw

1939 August 27 The He-178, designed by Hans von Ohain, becomes the first jet engine to fly, with a test flight lasting five minutes

1939 August 21 A secret protocol, attached to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, divides Poland and the Baltic states between Germany and Russia

1939 August 21 Ribbentrop flies to Moscow to sign a Nonaggression Pact with Molotov, depriving Britain and France of an ally

1939 August 2 German-born US physicist Albert Einstein writes to President Roosevelt, warning of the potential of an atomic bomb

1939 May 11 An incident on the border between Japanese Manchukuo and Soviet territory sparks a four-month war with the USSR that brings heavy Japanese losses

1939 August Helped by the results of Polish cryptographers, Bletchley Park begins to gain invaluable access to German military secrets

1939 August A Franco-British military mission arrives in Moscow to persuade Stalin to join a pact in defence of Poland

1939 May 3 Stalin appoints Vyacheslav Molotov as People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the USSR

1939 March 31 The recent fate of Czechoslovakia prompts France and Britain to guarantee the security of Poland

1939 March 15 Hitler's armies smash their way into Czechoslovakia and enter Prague, against all his previous promises

1939 March Hungary aligns itself with the Axis powers, signing Germany and Japan's

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Anti-Comintern Pact

1939 February 2 De Valera declares that Eire will be neutral in any forthcoming European war

1939 The US jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker acquires the nickname 'Yardbird', or simply 'Bird'

1939 US crime-writer Raymond Chandler publishes his first novel, The Big Sleep, introducing the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe

1939 Joaquin Rodrigo's concerto for guitar and orchestra, the Concierto de Aranjuez, has its first performance in Barcelona

1939 John Ford directs John Wayne in the film Stagecoach

1939 Igor Stravinsky moves to the USA from Paris, his home for nearly 30 years, and settles in Hollywood

1939 British pianist Myra Hess begins a wartime series of lunchtime concerts in London's National Gallery

1939 British author Christopher Isherwood publishes his novel Goodbye to Berlin, based on his own experiences in the city

1939 Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan becomes music director of the Berlin State Opera

1939 British racing driver Malcolm Campbell sets a new water speed record of 141 mph

1939 Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh star in Gone with the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell's novel

1939 Australian author Patrick White publishes his first novel, Happy Valley

1939 US designer Igor Sikorsky tests the first practical helicopter, using a rotor on a long tail boom to counter torque

1939 Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears give a series of recitals in the USA at the start of a lifelong partnership

1939 Archaeological treasures are discovered in an Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk

1939 Robert Menzies, leader of the United Australia Party, becomes Australia's prime minister

1939 Ninotchka, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, is another great success for the Swedish film

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star Greta Garbo

1939 Irish author Flann O'Brien publishes his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds

1939 John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family, sharecroppers who are forced to move west to escape the horrors of the Dust Bowl

1939 US chemist Linus Pauling publishes his collected discoveries on The nature of the chemical bond

1939 Victor Fleming directs 17-year-old Judy Garland in the film of the famous musical The Wizard of Oz

1939 's concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington effectively launches the US civil rights movement

1939 James Thurber publishes his short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

1939 Tommy Handley has a huge success in the British comedy radio programme ITMA (It's That Man Again)

1939 Madrid falls to the Nationalist forces, bringing the Spanish Civil War to an end and Franco to power

1939 Eugenio Pacelli is elected pope and takes the name Pius XII

1939 US author Henry Miller publishes in Paris Tropic of Capricorn, about his adolescence in New York

1939 Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson move their studios to St Ives

1939 James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is published after 17 years in the making

1939 W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrate together to the USA, later becoming US citizens

1939 German physicists, led by Otto Hahn, announce their discovery of nuclear fission

1938 November 9 Nazi gangs smash the premises of Jews throughout Germany and Austria in a night that becomes known as Kristallnacht, the night of cut glass

1938 October Adolf Hitler demands a strip of territory through the Polish corridor to reunite Germany with East

1938 October Adolf Hitler makes unacceptable demands upon Poland, including the transfer of the free port of Danzig to Germany

1938 October The Sudetenland is transferred from Czechoslovakia to Germany, in

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accordance with the Munich agreement

1938 September 30 Poland insists that the industrial area of Teschen Silesia, largely inhabited by Poles, be ceded by Czechoslovakia

1938 September 30 Neville Chamberlain returns to Britain from Munich claiming to have achieved 'peace for our time... peace with honour'

1938 September 29 Chamberlain and Daladier agree at Munich that Hitler may annexe the Czech Sudetenland, with its largely German population

1938 September 29 Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier fly to Munich to discuss Hitler's designs on the Czech Sudetenland

1938 September 15 Neville Chamberlain makes the first of three flights to Germany, this time to negotiate with Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden

1938 Voters in both Germany and Austria give massive approval for Hitler's annexation of Austria

1938 Left-wingers and Jews suffer immediate persecution in Nazi Austria, now part of Germany

1938 April 24 The Sudeten German National Socialist Party demands secession from Czechoslovakia, in keeping with Hitler's plans for the Sudetenland

1938 March 12 Adolf Hitler, following his troops into Austria, announces the Anschluss (union of Germany and Austria)

1938 March 1 German tanks cross the border into Austria, on the official invitation of Austrian Nazis

1938 March 11 The Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg resigns in the face of threats from Hitler, and broadcasts that he is doing so under duress

1938 March 9 The Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, defies Hitler by announcing a referendum on his country's independence

1938 February 12 Adolf Hitler uses threats of force to browbeat the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, into granting special favours to Austrian Nazis

1938 February 4 Adolf Hitler appoints Joachim von Ribbentrop as Germany's foreign minister

1938 The first of many ballets to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet score is premiered in Czechoslovakia

1938 The peace of Buenos Aires, ending the Chaco War, gives Paraguay most of the

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region under dispute with Bolivia

1938 After Chamberlain's Munich Agreement, Harold Macmillan becomes a prominent member of a Conservative minority opposing appeasement

1938 US tennis player Donald Budge becomes the first person to achieve the grand slam, winning all four majors in the same year

1938 Lavrenty Beria is appointed head of Stalin's state security organization, the NKVD

1938 US architectural critic Lewis Mumford publishes The Culture of Cities

1938 A dramatized version of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, broadcast on US radio, terrifies listeners who think Martians are invading

1938 Lord Nuffield donates to Commonwealth hospitals 'iron lungs', built at his Morris Oxford factory,

1938 23-year-old Rangoon student Aung San, later the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, becomes general secretary of a freedom party, Dobama Asiayone (Our Burma Union)

1938 Irish author Samuel Beckett publishes his first novel, Murphy

1938 Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein directs Alexander Nevsky, with music by Prokofiev

1938 Maxim de Winter's house, Manderley, holds dark secrets in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca

1938 Wind erosion makes this the worst year of the Dust Bowl crisis in the midwest USA

1938 British author Graham Greene publishes Brighton Rock, a novel following 17-year- old Pinkie in the criminal underworld of the seaside town

1938 Yorkshire batsman Len Hutton scores a record 364 in a Test match against Australia at the Oval

1938 American naïve painter Grandma Moses has her first exhibition in a local drug store at the age of 78

1938 Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) builds the Burma Road as a supply route

1938 In Homage to Catalonia George Orwell describes his experiences fighting for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War

1938 French writer Jean-Paul Sartre succeeds with his first novel, La Nausée ('Nausea')

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1938 Harold Macmillan publishes The Middle Way, outlining a practical course of political action largely based on the ideas of Keynes

1938 Delmore Schwartz publishes his first book of poems, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

1938 The Du Pont Corporation begins manufacture of a new synthetic silk yarn, subsequently known as nylon

1938 British author Evelyn Waugh publishes a classic Fleet Street novel, Scoop, introducing Lord Copper, proprietor of The Beast

1938 The first shipload of oil is exported from Saudi Arabia to the USA after the discovery of commercially viable resources in Dhahran

1938 Thornton Wilder's play Our Town opens on Broadway

1938 Gloucestershire batsman Wally Hammond becomes captain of the England Test team

1938 The Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira wins success with the first exhibition of his watercolours

1938 The House Un-American Activities Committee is formed by US congressmen to investigate politically subversive groups

1938 Leading British artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson marry

1938 Mexico, newly rich from oil, nationalizes the holdings of the foreign oil companies

1938 Finnish designer Alvar Aalto develops a bent plywood three-legged stool, specifically designed for stacking

1937 William Joyce defects from Mosley's Union of Fascists and founds his own National Socialist League in London

1937 US architect Frank Lloyd Wright designs Taliesin West in Arizona as his winter home and studio

1937 Richmond Bridge is widened, to accommodate modern traffic, with the original stones used to clad the extension

1937 George Orwell reveals the harsh realities of contemporary British life in The Road to Wigan Pier

1937 Cambridge House in Twickenham is demolished.

1937 De Valera's new constitution for Eire lays claim to the six counties of northern

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Ireland

1937 De Valera introduces a new constitution, changing the name of the Irish Free State to Eire (Gaelic for Ireland)

1937 The Japanese capture the Chinese capital, Nanjing, and massacre at least 300,000 inhabitants within a few weeks

1937 Stanley Spencer gives a stark depiction of himself and his wife in The Leg of Mutton Nude

1937 William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore open a school of art with a distinctive style, known from its location as the Euston Road School

1937 British biochemist Max Perutz begins the analysis of haemoglobin

1937 Adolf Hitler, entertaining Mussolini in Germany, puts on spectacular demonstrations of German military and industrial might

1937 's massive painting is exhibited in the Spanish pavilion at the World Fair in Paris

1937 Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first animated feature film

1937 Rocket engineer Wernher von Braun is appointed director of Germany's weapon research centre at Peenemünde

1937 Alan Turing describes the properties of a logically possible computer that becomes known as the Turing Machine

1937 C.S. Forester's central character, Horatio Hornblower, features for the first time – in The Happy Return

1937 Buchenwald, near Weimar, is set up as a concentration camp providing forced labour for local arms manufacturers

1937 Japanese troops occupy Beijing – at the start of eight years of continuous war between China and Japan

1937 A Nazi exhibition of 'degenerate art' opens in Munich, and visitors are invited to mock the avant-garde works on show

1937 At the same time as the Moscow show trials, millions are purged from the Russian Communist party nation-wide

1937 The Japanese use an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge, near Beijing, as the pretext for an attack on China

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1937 Danish author Karen Blixen publishes her autobiographical novel Out of Africa

1937 Amelia Earhart and her navigator vanish somewhere over the Pacific four weeks into their attempt to fly round the world

1937 Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller is arrested for defying the Nazis and spends the next eight years in concentration camps

1937 German-born British scientist Hans Krebs discovers the biochemical cycle that becomes known by his name

1937 Under Nazi influence the University of Bonn deprives Thomas Mann of his honorary doctorate, which is restored to him in 1946

1937 John Steinbeck publishes Of Mice and Men, a novel about two itinerant farm labourers in California

1937 The Golden Gate Bridge, linking San Francisco and Marin County, is the world's longest suspension bridge with a main span of 4200 feet (1280m)

1937 Neville Chamberlain follows Baldwin as prime minister at the head of the UK's National government

1937 Congress rejects President Roosevelt's proposed reform of the US Supreme Court, amid furious accusations that he is trying to pack the Court with his nominees

1937 Congress passes a Neutrality Act, to prevent US aid being given to belligerent nations

1937 William Walton writes Crown Imperial for the coronation of George VI

1937 The German airship Hindenburg bursts into flames over New Jersey, bringing to an end the era of rigid airships

1937 The first can of Spam goes on sale, produced by the Hormel company of Austin, Minnesota

1937 British artist Ben Nicholson does the first of his characteristic abstract white reliefs

1937 German planes bomb the Basque capital, Guernica, in support of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War

1937 The Nationalist leader in Spain, Francisco Franco, merges Falange with other right- wing parties to form the Movimento

1937 Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, condemning the Nazi ideology of racism

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1937 US trombonist Glenn Miller forms his first band, the Glenn Miller Orchestra

1937 French film director Jean Renoir makes La Grande Illusion, set in World War I

1937 Joe Louis, 'The Brown Bomber', defeats James J. Braddock to become world heavyweight champion

1937 Anastasio Somoza makes himself president of Nicaragua, beginning four decades of brutal rule by his family

1936 Hungarian photographer Robert Capa achieves an unprecedented immediacy in his coverage of the Spanish Civil War

1936 Edward VIII is succeeded on the British throne by his brother, as George VI

1936 Edward VIII, forced to choose between the British throne and Wallis Simpson, opts for the path of love and abdicates

1936 F.D. Roosevelt is elected for a second US presidential term with an increased share of the vote

1936 Germany and Japan establish an Anti-Comintern Pact against their common enemy, the USSR

1936 The Spanish Civil War causes the Basque designer Cristobal Balenciaga to move his business to Paris, capital of the fashion world

1936 The Febreristas, a newly formed left-wing group, seize power in Paraguay

1936 The first volunteers in the International Brigade arrive in Spain to fight for the Republican cause in the civil war

1936 The British Broadcasting Corporation puts out its first high-definition public television broadcast

1936 Francisco Franco is elected head of state of the insurgent Nationalist Spain, at this time controlling only a fraction of the country

1936 US publisher Henry Luce launches a new picture magazine, calling it simply Life

1936 Hitler and Mussolini form an axis, or alliance, causing Germany and Italy to become known as the Axis powers

1936 Wallis Simpson wins a decree nisi against her second husband and is therefore free to marry Edward VIII

1936 Unemployed English workers march for 26 days from Jarrow, in Tyne and Wear, to demonstrate at Westminster

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1936 French-born US author Anaïs Nin publishes her first novel, The House of Incest

1936 Rachmaninov completes his Third Symphony, and records it two years later with the Philadelphia Orchestra

1936 Carl Orff's cantata Carmina Burana has its premiere in Frankfurt

1936 The prototype of the Spitfire, designed by Reginald Mitchell, has its first test flight

1936 On Stalin's orders Dmitry Shostakovich is attacked in for providing 'chaos instead of music'

1936 Alexander Korda's bleakly visionary film Things to Come is based on the H.G. Wells novel of 1933

1936 In the first month of the Spanish Civil War the playwright García Lorca is arrested and shot by rebel Falange militia

1936 Terence Rattigan's first play, French without Tears, is performed in London

1936 At the Berlin Olympics, attended by Hitler, the African-American athlete Jesse Owens sets three new Olympic records and equals a fourth

1936 In Language, Truth and Logic 26-year-old A.J. Ayer produces a classic exposition of Logical Positivism

1936 Mussolini appoints his son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, as his minister for foreign affairs

1936 A rebellion by Spanish troops in Morocco is soon led by Francisco Franco and sparks the Spanish Civil War

1936 Hitler gives Reinhard Heydrich control of the Gestapo

1936 John Maynard Keynes defines his economics in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

1936 William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! chronicles the violently destructive rise and fall of a poor Southern white, Thomas Sutpen

1936 Maxim Gorky dies in suspicious circumstances while undergoing routine medical treatment in the USSR

1936 Paul Robeson sings 'Ol' Man River' in the film of Jerome Kern's Showboat

1936 British mathematician Alan Turing writes an influential paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidung Problem

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1936 In response to the gang violence of Oswald Mosley's black-shirted thugs, a Public Order Act in the UK bans political uniforms

1936 Membership of the Hitler Youth (for boys) or the League of German Maidens is made compulsory

1936 Stalin stages the first of the Moscow show trials, designed to eliminate any surviving high-level opponents

1936 US author Margaret Mitchell publishes her one book, which becomes probably the best-selling novel of all time – Gone with the Wind

1936 García Lorca writes his play The House of Bernarda Alba in the last year of his short life

1936 The Italian forces invading Ethiopia reach Addis Ababa, and Haile Selassie flees into exile

1936 German architect Werner March designs spectacular buildings for the Berlin Olympics

1936 US composer Aaron Copland writes El Salón México, using popular Mexican tunes

1936 The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is founded as a public service in competition with private radio stations

1936 On the death of his father, Fuad I, the 16-year-old Farouk becomes king of Egypt

1936 Frank Lloyd Wright experiments with prefabrication for low-cost housing in a style he calls Usonian (meaning 'in the US style')

1936 The rest of Europe offers no effective objection when Adolf Hitler moves his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland

1936 Salvador Dali creates a stir by attending the opening of London's Surrealist exhibition in a diving suit

1936 In Modern Times, the last film featuring the little tramp, Charlie Chaplin sets his character in a mechanistic, impersonal world

1936 The new sound of jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman's touring band brings him the title 'King of Swing'

1936 George V dies and is succeeded on the British throne by his eldest son Edward VIII

1935 Alban Berg's opera Lulu is incomplete when the composer dies

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1935 US jazz pianist William ('count') Basie acquires his own orchestra

1935 Kim Il Sung leads a Communist guerrilla campaign against the Japanese occupation of Korea

1935 Within the National government Ramsay MacDonald cedes the role of prime minister to the Conservative leader,

1935 George Gershwin's 'folk opera' Porgy and Bess, based on the novel by DuBose Heyward, opens on Broadway

1935 British publisher Allen Lane launches a paperback series to which he gives the name Penguin Books

1935 R.K. Narayan's novel Swami and Friends is the first set in his fictional town of Malgudi

1935 The survivors of the Long March reach safety in Shaanxi province in northwest China

1935 W.L. Mackenzie King starts another long spell, of thirteen years, as Canadian prime minister

1935 A collection of Constantine Cavafy's poems is published in Alexandria in an undated edition

1935 Mussolini uses a disagreement over grazing rights as a pretext for an empire- building invasion of Ethiopia

1935 Italian baritone Tito Gobbi makes his operatic debut in Gubbio in Bellini's La Somnambula

1935 New Nazi laws announced at Nuremberg strip Jews of their German citizenship

1935 US industrialist Howard Hughes sets a new speed record of 352 mph, flying a plane designed by himself

1935 Leningrad's opera and ballet company is renamed the Kirov, in memory of the city's recently assassinated commissar

1935 Marie Rambert's London-based company, deriving originally from her school, takes the name Ballet Rambert

1935 The mighty Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947) is completed on the Colorado River

1935 French cabaret singer Edith Gassion acquires the nickname la môme piaf ('the little sparrow'), and so becomes Edith Piaf

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1935 Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges publishes A Universal History of Infamy, one of the first examples of magic realism

1935 Adolf Hitler promulgates a law prohibiting any sexual relationship between Jews and 'Aryans'

1935 The Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz describes his experiments on young geese, with their capacity to imprint on human beings

1935 Adolf Hitler gives Karl Dönitz, a submarine commander from World War I, responsibility for Germany's U-boat programme

1935 US seismologist Charles Richter devises a scale for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes

1935 Elias Canetti publishes the novel later translated into English as Auto da Fé

1935 George Gallup founds the American Institute of Public Opinion and becomes the pioneer of modern polling techniques

1935 T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral has its first performance in Canterbury cathedral

1935-1938 Adolf Hitler's rearmament programme begins to reduce German unemployment, and by 1938 eliminates it entirely

1935 Alban Berg writes his Violin Concerto, commissioned by Louis Krasner, in memory of Manon Gropius

1935 In A Night at the Opera the Marx Brothers make the first of their films as the famous threesome, Groucho, Harpo and Chico

1935 A truce ends armed hostilities in the three-year Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay

1935 Tortilla Flat brings success for the US novelist John Steinbeck

1935 Strikers in Vancouver begin the On-to-Ottawa Trek, to take their grievances to government

1935 US athlete Jesse Owens sets three world records and equals a fourth within the space of less than an hour in Ann Arbor, Michigan

1935 Arthur Honegger's opera Joan of Arc at the Stake has its premiere in Basel

1935 Pablo Picasso's , a masterpiece of etching, prefigures some of the themes of Guernica

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1935 Frank Lloyd Wright designs Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, for Edgar Kaufmann

1935 In Frontier the Japanese-US sculptor Isamu Noguchi designs the first of his many sets for Martha Graham ballets

1935 Mao Zedong wins control over the Chinese Communists during the Long March

1935 The Viipury Library in Finland makes the reputation of a young Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto

1935 George Balanchine's new company, American Ballet, has its first brief season in New York

1935 Frank Lloyd directs Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in a dramatic account of the famous mutiny on the Bounty

1935 Adolf Hitler gets away with a calculated international risk when he reintroduces conscription in Germany

1935 The people of the rich mining district of the Saar vote to merge with Germany

1935 Adolf Hitler reinstates Germany's airforce, the Luftwaffe, putting Hermann Goering in command

1935 The German composer Kurt Weill moves to New York, where he writes Broadway musicals

1935 Adolf Hitler informs Britain and France that he is building up the German armed f orces, in contravention of the Versailles treaty

1935 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers have one of their greatest successes dancing in their fourth film together, Top Hat

1934 Openly hostile to the Nazis, the architect Walter Gropius moves to England and three years later makes the USA his home

1934 Mohammed Ali Jinnah becomes president of the Muslim League in India

1934 Josip Broz, a leading member of the banned Communist Party of Yugoslavia, adopts the name Tito

1934 Sergei Kirov, head of the party in Leningrad, is assassinated in his office, giving Stalin the pretext for his first massive purge

1934 Paul Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler is banned by the Nazis and is not performed until 1938 in Zurich

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1934 To escape the forces, the Chinese Communist army begins the Long March from Jiangxi province to Shaanxi

1934 Hitler tells the party faithful in a Nuremberg rally that their new third Reich will last for 1000 years

1934 In a referendum 38 million German voters say yes to Adolf Hitler becoming Führer, Germany's supreme leader

1934 Neo-Destour, a party demanding Tunisian independence, has Habib Bourguiba as its secretary general

1934 15-year-old English ballerina Margot Fonteyn makes her first appearance, dancing as a Snowflake in Nutcracker

1934 Swedish tenor Jussi Björling makes his debut in Stockholm, in Puccini's Manon Lescaut

1934 USSR joins the League of Nations, after Germany leaves the organization

1934 In A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh sends his hero Tony Last to a disastrous fate, far away in the Amazon rain forest

1934 Berthold Lubetkin and Ove Arup provide a modernist pool for the penguins in London Zoo

1934 The US military government is finally withdrawn from Haiti after nineteen years

1934 6-year-old Shirley Temple wins instant fame after starring in Stand up and Cheer

1934 Sergei Rachmaninov writes the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in his villa beside Lake Lucerne

1934 In I, Claudius the autobiography of the Roman emperor is ghost-written by Robert Graves

1934 Paul von Hindenburg dies, enabling Adolf Hitler to combine the roles of president, chancellor and supreme commander of the German armed forces

1934 In Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour two teachers are maliciously accused of lesbianism by one of their pupils

1934 Kurt von Schuschnigg succeeds the murdered Dollfuss as Austria's chancellor and Hitler's opponent

1934 The Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss is assassinated by Nazis in a coup that fails

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1934 Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grapelli form the Quintet du Hot Club de France

1934 Australian author Christina Stead publishes a first novel based on her own family, Seven Poor Men of Sydney

1934 The Scottish National Party, or SNP, is founded to campaign for an independent Scotland

1934 In addition to the SS, Heinrich Himmler is given command of the state secret police, or Gestapo

1934 Multiple murders are carried out on Hitler's orders during the Night of the Long Knives

1934 Adolf Hitler visits his SA commander, Ernst Roehm, in his hotel before having him shot

1934 The bottom of Kew Pond is concreted

1934 Elijah Muhammad takes control of the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims, and leads the movement for more than 40 years

1934 Erich Korngold, one of Austria's most admired composers, moves to Hollywood

1934 Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie discover artificial radioactivity

1934 British painter Francis Bacon has his first solo show in London

1934 British tennis player Fred Perry wins the first of three consecutive Wimbledon singles titles

1934 Benito Mussolini plays host in Venice to Adolf Hitler, the newcomer among European dictators

1934 Anastasio Somoza, commander of the National Guard, organizes a coup in Nicaragua

1934 Five girls are born as quintuplets in the Dionne family of French Catholic farmers in Corbeil, Ontario

1934 The first opera festival at Glyndebourne, a country house in Sussex, opens with a performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro

1934 German photographer Leni Riefenstahl glorifies Hitler and the Nuremberg rally in her film Triumph of the Will

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1934 The Indian Reorganization Act restores tribal ownership of land in the US reservations

1934 US author Henry Miller publishes in Paris a largely sexual autobiography, Tropic of Cancer, about his life as an expatriate

1934 US author Scott FitzGerald publishes his novel Tender Is the Night

1934 Nazi architect Albert Speer designs a spectacular new setting for the party's annual Nuremberg rally

1934 Dmitry Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District has its premiere in Leningrad's Maly Theatre

1933 Arnold Schoenberg leaves his teaching post in Germany, now under Nazi control, and in 1934 settles in Los Angeles

1933 In Down and Out in Paris and London English author George Orwell writes a sympathetic account of the people he meets on hard times

1933 25% of workers in Canada are unemployed as the Depression continues to deepen

1933 The first Dinky Toys cars go on sale in Britain, originally under the name Modelled Miniatures

1933 J. Arthur Rank founds the Religious Film Society to make films in Britain that will bring people to Christianity

1933 19-year-old Mexican poet Octavio Paz publishes his first collection, Wild Moon

1933 Fritz Lang's film The Testament of Dr Mabuse is banned in Germany because of implicit criticism of Nazi thugs

1933 Adolf Hitler wins massive referendum support for his withdrawal of Germany from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations

1933 Adolf Hitler, the new German chancellor, pulls Germany out of the League of Nations and its disarmament conference

1933 Mae West gives Cary Grant his big break, choosing him as her co-star in She Done Him Wrong

1933 Thomas Mann leaves Germany and moves to Switzerland, where he engages in a steady polemic against the Nazis

1933 García Lorca writes his play Blood Wedding while he is director of a company touring in rural Spain

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1933 Germany becomes a one-party state, with only the Nazis allowed to engage in political activity

1933 The Marx Brothers make their last film as a foursome, Duck Soup, with Zeppo still in the team

1933 Arabella, by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is first performed four years after von Hofmannsthal's death left it incomplete

1933 The Nazi government dismisses Konrad Adenauer from all his appointments, included that of Lord Mayor of Cologne

1933 George Balanchine, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht collaborate in Paris on Seven Deadly Sins, a ballet with songs

1933 Erskine Caldwell publishes a novel, God's Little Acre, about a farmer obsessed with finding gold on his farm

1933 English author Antonia White publishes an autobiographical first novel, Frost in May

1933 The Hutus and Tutsis of Ruanda-Urundi are issued with racial identity cards by the Belgians

1933 Fine Gael is the name given to a new political party in Ireland, formed by the merger of several smaller groups

1933 Draughtsman Harry Beck, inspired by electrical circuits, produces a classic map of London's underground

1933 King Kong, an enduringly successful horror film, is based on a story by Edgar Wallace

1933 The Pylon group of British poets get their name from Stephen Spender's poem 'The Pylons'

1933 Gertrude Stein publishes a best-selling account of her own life under the title The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

1933 Unknown American blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, or Leadbelly, is first recorded singing in the Louisiana State Penitentiary

1933 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance together for the first time on film, in Flying Down to Rio

1933 The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the largest project launched in the first of Roosevelt's New Deal

1933 US actress Katherine Hepburn wins the first of four Oscars in only her second film,

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Morning Glory

1933 H.G. Wells publishes The Shape of Things to Come, a novel in which he accurately predicts a renewal of world war

1933 Fulgencio Batista, as army chief of staff, begins a long career running the affairs of Cuba

1933 Alexander Korda directs Charles Laughton in the film The Private Life of Henry VIII

1933 The new Nazi government closes down Germany's distinguished school of modern art and , the Bauhaus

1933 The fourth Hampton Court Bridge, designed by Edwin Lutyens, is opened by the Price of Wales, on 3 July 1933, who also opens Chiswick Bridge and Twickenham Bridge on the same day

1933 A public outcry over the building of Temple House joined onto Garrick's Temple runs very high. The Council purchases the site for public recreation and demolishes the house

1933 Adolf Hitler passes a law forcing the 'retirement' of all Jews working in the civil service, schools and universities

1933 Japan announces its withdrawal from the League of Nations after a resolution is passed declaring the Japanese occupation of Manchuria illegal

1933 Lloyd Bacon directs 42nd Street, a classic backstage movie about putting a musical comedy on Broadway

1933 In My Life and Hard Times James Thurber's publishes an affectionate account of his family, including the night the bed fell on his father

1933 Gustav Krupp and his son Alfried, Germany’s main manufacturers of armaments, join the Nazi party

1933 Adolf Hitler puts a bill before the first meeting of the newly elected Reichstag, giving himself unrestricted powers

1933 Pablo Neruda increases his international reputation with a collection of surrealist poems, Residencia en la tierra ('Residence on earth')

1933 The Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss suspends parliament and subsequently outlaws the Nazi party

1933 Heinrich Himmler sets up the first Nazi concentration camp, at Dachau near Munich

1933 Hungarian photographer Brassaï publishes his photographs of the seedier side of

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Paris night life in Paris de Nuit

1933 President Roosevelt gives the first of his many 'fireside chats' to the US nation on radio

1933 The burning of the Reichstag during the German election enables Adolf Hitler to introduce emergency measures restricting liberty

1933 Polish cryptographers succeed in breaking some of the Enigma code used by the German military

1933 The electoral campaign for a new Reichstag, demanded by Hitler, is conducted with escalating Nazi violence

1933 Prohibition is lifted in the USA when the Twenty-First Amendment repeals the Eighteenth, which has been in force for 13 years

1933 German chancellor Adolf Hitler orders the sterilization of carriers of hereditary mental diseases, in one of his government's first pieces of legislation

1933 President Hindenburg appoints Adolf Hitler chancellor of the German republic

1932 The British artist Graham Sutherland, after an early career as a printmaker, takes up painting relatively late in life

1932 English conductor Thomas Beecham founds another orchestra, calling it the London Philharmonic

1932 English fast-bowler Harold Larwood causes outrage using the 'body-line' attack, devised by his captain, Douglas Jardine, in Test matches against Australia

1932 Unemployment in Germany rises during the world-wide depression to the unprecedented level of 6 million

1932 George V reads on radio a Christmas address (written by Rudyard Kipling), beginning an annual royal tradition

1932 The incumbent president, Republican Herbert Hoover, suffers a heavy defeat by Democrat F.D. Roosevelt in the US election

1932 The Bluebell Girls, formed by Margaret Kelly ('Miss Bluebell'), give their first performances in Paris

1932 US author Damon Runyon publishes his first collection of stories about low-life New York, under the title Guys and Dolls

1932 16-year-old Yehudi Menuhin records the Elgar violin concerto, conducted by the composer

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1932 Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan star as Tarzan and Jane in Tarzan the Ape Man, the first of countless Tarzan talkies

1932 Young Lonigan: a Boyhood in Chicago Streets is the first novel in James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy

1932 A deeply flawed experiment with African American syphilis patients is launched in Tuskegee, Alabama

1932 De Valera withholds farmers' annuities from Britain, provoking British tariffs and a trade war

1932 John Cowper Powys's novel A Glastonbury Romance is published first in New York

1932 Oswald Mosley holds his first rally in Trafalgar Square, at the head of his British Union of Fascists

1932 US novelist Erskine Caldwell publishes Tobacco Road, about white sharecroppers coping with poverty and desperation in Georgia

1932 Ernst Lubitsch has a great success with Trouble in Paradise, a Hollywood comedy about villainy and romance in Paris

1932 Mae West stars alongside George Raft in her first film, Night after Night

1932 Unemployment in Britain reaches three million, or more than 25% of the work force

1932 British author Aldous Huxley gives a bleak view of a science-based future in his novel Brave New World

1932 Winning 230 seats in the election, the Nazis become the largest party in the Reichstag (albeit not with a majority)

1932 Troops using bayonets and tear gas drive out of Washington the Bonus Army, a group of protesting unemployed war veterans

1932 Ernest Hemingway, an aficionado of the sport, publishes Death in the Afternoon, a non-fiction account of bullfighting in Spain

1932 After gaining control of most of the Arabian peninsula, Ibn Saud gives his kingdom a new name, Saudi Arabia

1932 US athlete Mildred 'Babe' Didrikson breaks four world records in one afternoon in Evanston, Illinois

1932 Fianna Fáil wins enough seats in the Irish Free State's election for Eamon de Valera to form a government

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1932 Presidential candidate F.D. Roosevelt pledges himself at the Democratic convention to deliver 'a new deal for the American people'

1932 The town of Maxim Gorky's birth, Nizhny-Novgorod, is renamed Gorky in his honour

1932 British physicist James Chadwick shows that the behaviour of subatomic particles can be explained by the existence of neutrons, or particles with no electrical charge

1932 US aviator Amelia Earhart lands in Ireland 15 hours after leaving Newfoundland, to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic

1932 French playwright Jean Anouilh has his first play, L'Hermine, produced and published

1932 Marcel Duchamp coins the term 'mobile' for Alexander Calder's new suspended art form

1932 British author C.S. Lewis publishes a moral parable, The Screwtape Letters, about the problems confronting a trainee devil

1932 Antonio de Oliveira Salazar becomes prime minister of Portugal with dictatorial powers

1932 John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton are the first to split an atom, by bombarding it with accelerated protons

1932 The newly formed de Monte Carlo opens for its first season, with George Balanchine as

1932 Adolf Hitler stands for election as president of the German republic and wins 36% of the vote

1932 One of the defining landmarks of Sydney, in Australia, is opened – the single-span steel arch bridge across the city's harbour

1932 The Chaco War breaks out between Bolivia and Paraguay, in dispute over the swampy plain known as the Gran Chaco

1932 Adolf Hitler finally exchanges Austrian for German nationality, just in time to run for the German presidency

1932 Japan renames the Chinese province of Manchuria, calling it Manchukuo – supposedly independent but in fact a puppet state

1932 Charles and Anne Lindbergh's one-year-old son, Charles Jr, is kidnapped and subsequently found murdered

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1932 US poet Archibald MacLeish publishes a narrative epic, Conquistador, about the conquest of Mexico

1932 The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has his first exhibition, in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York

1932 Russian-born architect Berthold Lubetkin and others set up in London the modernist firm of Tecton

1931 Boris Karloff gives a touching portrayal of the monster created by Dr Frankenstein, in the first of several screen performances in the role

1931 A new West stand is completed at Twickenham rugby ground increasing spectator capacity to 74,000, and an additional 6 acres of land are purchased.

1931 In his painting The Persistence of Memory Salvador Dali provides the disturbing image of watches drooping from the edge of flat surfaces

1931 Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli introduces a successful new line for women in the form of the padded shoulder

1931 Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg's Group Theatre present their first professional production, The House of Connelly by Paul Green

1931 The George Washington Bridge links New York with New Jersey, and is the world's longest suspension bridge with a main span of 3500 feet (1066m)

1931 Harold Macmillan recovers the parliamentary seat of Stockton-on-Tees

1931 Pay cuts cause British sailors in the Atlantic fleet to mutiny at Invergordon, in Scotland's Cromarty Firth

1931 The trilogy Mourning becomes Electra, Eugene O'Neill's transposition to New England of the Oresteia story, is performed in New York

1931 In Pietr-Le-Letton, the first novel published under his own name, the Belgian writer Georges Simenon introduces Inspector Maigret

1931 16-year-old English footballer Stanley Matthews plays his first League game for Stoke City

1931 The Japanese occupy the Chinese state of Manchuria

1931 Virginia Woolf publishes the most fluid of her novels, The Waves, in which she tells the story through six interior monologues

1931 Charlie Chaplin makes City Lights, in which the tramp befriends and helps a blind flower girl

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1931 Amid political crisis Labour-leader Ramsay MacDonald forms an all-party National Government in Britain

1931 The Irish government classifies the Irish Republican Army as an illegal organization

1931 Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels makes Der Führer a compulsory term for Hitler in the Nazi party

1931 Irgun, a new Jewish paramilitary group, is set up by Haganah commanders frustrated by the older organization's policies

1931 A dance company, brought together by Ninette de Valois as the Vic-Wells Ballet, begins performing at Sadler's Wells

1931 Geoffrey De Havilland designs the Tiger Moth, on which nearly all British pilots were trained during World War II

1931 The Star-Spangled Banner is made the official US national anthem

1931 The US poet Ogden Nash has an immediate success with his first volume of poems, Hard Lines

1931 The gold standard is abandoned throughout the world after massive capital outflows cause the United Kingdom to pull out of the system

1931 President Hoover switches on the lights to inaugurate the world's new tallest skyscraper, the Empire State Building in New York

1931 Sectarian hostilities increase in Kashmir, with the Muslim majority resenting the favours shown by the British to the Sikh and Hindu elite

1931 Frederick Ashton choreographs Façade for the Camargo Society, using Walton's score

1931 Nine black teenagers, known as the Scottsboro Boys, are wrongly convicted of gang in a notorious US race-relations case

1931 On his first expedition to the Olduvai Gorge, Louis Leakey finds the oldest object now in the British Museum - the chopping tool from about 1.8 million years ago

1931 US film star James Cagney has a great success in the first of his many gangster roles, in The Public Enemy

1931 US critic Edmund Wilson publishes Axel's Castle, a collection of essays about writers in the symbolist tradition

1931 Six million Russian peasants die after being transported to agricultural labour

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camps in Siberia

1931 25 million peasants are moved from the land to provide cheap labour in Stalin's new factories

1931 US actress Bette Davis moves to Hollywood and appears in her first film, The Bad Sister

1931 US gangster Al Capone, never convicted of murder, begins an 8-year-spell in jail for tax evasion

1931 The Statute of Westminster defines and formalizes the concept of the British Commonwealth

1930 The British Broadcasting Corporation forms a Symphony Orchestra with Adrian Boult as the first music director

1930 A spoof history text book, 1066 and all that, is justifiably described by its authors, Walter Sellar and Robert Yeatman, as a Memorable History of England

1930-1933 Starting in 1930, the fourth Hampton Court Bridge is constucted, slightly downstream from the previous bridge, of ferro-concrete faced with red brick and portland stone in the Wren style

1930 US choreographer Busby Berkeley moves to Hollywood to provide the first of his famous dance spectaculars, in Whoopee

1930 US author John Dos Passos publishes the first novel of his trilogy The 42nd Parallel

1930 Australian-born composer Percy Grainger writes variations on Handel's tune The Harmonious Blacksmith

1930 Wallace D. Fard founds the Nation of Islam as a black separatist movement in the USA

1930 US inventor Richard Drew develops Scotch Brand Cellulose Tape, the world's first transparent tape

1930 English composer John Ireland's Piano Concerto has its first performance

1930 The Rastafarian cult evolves in Jamaica, viewing Ras Tafari, the emperor of Ethiopia, as the black Messiah

1930 The New Zealand racehorse Phar Lap wins huge popularity after an easy victory in the Melbourne Cup

1930 The Camargo Society, founded to promote British dancers and choreographers, presents its first evening of ballet in London

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1930 In his novel As I Lay Dying William Faulkner follows the journey of a coffin in a mule-drawn wagon

1930 'Garbo talks' and breaks box office records in her first sound film, Anna Christie, directed by Clarence Brown

1930 The airship R101, designed by a UK Air Ministry team, explodes on its maiden vogage, killing all but four of those on board

1930 Agatha Christie's Miss Marple makes her first appearance, in Murder at the Vicarage

1930 A pregnant female hamster, captured in Syria, becomes the ancestor of every pet hamster in the world

1930 The steel-band tradition begins to develop in Trinidad, with adapted metal objects taking the place of traditional skin drums

1930 The Nazis become the second largest party in the Reichstag, winning 107 seats

1930 Edward G. Robinson gives a chilling portrayal of a gangster loosely based on Al Capone in the film Little Caesar

1930 Lewis Milestone makes a powerful film of Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, published in the previous year

1930 British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac predicts the existence of an anti-particle of the electron, first observed two years later and named the positron

1930 Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence star in the West End in Private Lives, Coward's comedy of marital complications

1930 French actor Jean Gabin makes his screen debut in Chacun sa Chance

1930 Conservative leader R.B. Bennett defeats the Liberals and becomes prime minister of Canada

1930 Heitor Villa-Lobos composes the first of his Bachianas Brasileiras

1930 The verdict on Fred Astaire's first screen test, so the legend goes, is that he can't act, can't sing, is balding but can dance a little

1930 Rafael Trujillo establishes a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic that will last for 30 years

1930 US golfer Bobby Jones retires after winning his thirteenth major in eight years

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1930 Henri Matisse completes his Backsequence – four progressively simplified bronze relief sculptures (Nus de Dos)

1930 The Allies withdraw their occupying forces from Germany's Rhineland, five years ahead of schedule

1930 The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act introduces a US protectionist policy

1930 Wolfgang Pauli announces his mathematical proof of the existence of the particle subsequently known as the neutrino

1930 US crime-writer Dashiell Hammett publishes The Maltese Falcon, the novel in which he introduces his sardonic private eye, Sam Spade

1930 Getúlio Vargas begins a 24-year personal rule in Brazil

1930 The Chrysler Building opens in New York as the world's tallest skyscraper, but holds the record for only one year

1930 Swallows and Amazons is the first of Arthur Ransome's adventure stories for children

1930 English pioneer aviator Amy Johnson makes a 19-day solo flight in a Gipsy Moth from Croydon (part of London) to Darwin, Australia

1930 Adolf Hitler puts Joseph Goebbels at the head of the Nazi party's propaganda campaign

1930 English author W.H. Auden's first collection of poetry is published with the simple title Poems

1930 18-year-old Jean Harlow is a sensation in Hell's Angels, directed by Howard Hughes

1930 A military coup removes Hipolito Irigoyen from the presidency in Argentina

1930 Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson begin to create a garden at Sissinghurst in Kent

1930 The regent Ras Tafari becomes emperor of Ethiopia and takes the name Haile Selassie

1930 British inventor Frank Whittle takes out a patent for a jet engine

1930 The opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, opens in Leipzig

1930 The Hays Code sets exacting standards of public decency in US movies

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1930 In The Fur Trade in Canada Harold Innis traces the economic development linking the trade and the nation

1930 Mahatma Gandhi leads a 240-mile march from Ahmedabad to the sea to defy the British salt tax, thus launching a campaign of

1930 US author Marc Connelly's play Green Pastures has its premiere on Broadway

1930 Joseph von Sternberg directs Marlene Dietrich in the film The Blue Angel, shot in both German and English, making her an immediate international star

1930 The Irish National War Memorial opens in Dublin, designed by Edwin Lutyens in a garden setting

1930 René Clair blends satire and surrealism in his film Sous les Toits de Paris, a dark comedy about a Parisian street singer

1929 English poet Robert Graves puts behind him an England he dislikes in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That

1929 English author J.B. Priestley has an immediate success with his first novel, The Good Companions

1929 The beams and threshing stones of a seventeenth-century barn from Oxted, Surrey, are reassembled in North Sheen (now Kew) to form the first barn church in Britain

1929 US explorer Richard E. Byrd and two companions make the first flight over the South Pole, in a Ford Tri-Motor

1929 US author Thomas Wolfe publishes an autobiographical first novel, Look Homeward, Angel

1929 The British Broadcasting Corporation uses Logie Baird's system for its first trial TV broadcasts

1929 Panic selling on Thursday October 24 triggers a Wall Street and a spate of suicides

1929 An American Indian teenager, Ridgely Whiteman, finds the remains of a butchered mammoth near Clovis in - first evidence of the Clovis culture

1929 The Marx Brothers (now Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo) make their Hollywood debut with The Cocoanuts

1929 Mies van der Rohe designs his famous Barcelona Chair for the German pavilion at the Barcelona World Fair

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1929 Plutarco Calles establishes the National Revolutionary Party that will hold power in Mexico, under different names, for the rest of the century

1929 Baseball star Ty Cobb retires with a career record of 2245 runs, that will remain unbeaten into the twenty-first century

1929 Blind Fireworks is Ulster writer Louis MacNeice's first collection of poems

1929 George Formby makes the first records featuring what becomes his trademark, the ukulele

1929 Arabs in the Palestinian town of Hebron turn on their Jewish neighbours and murder sixty-seven

1929 Erich Maria Remarque publishes All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel based on his wartime experiences in the German army

1929 Jazz musician Fats Waller begins recording with his Buddies, one of the first racially integrated groups in the US music industry

1929 20-year-old French composer Olivier Messiaen publishes eight Preludes for piano

1929 Harold Macmillan's wife begins a long affair with Conservative MP Robert Boothby, but Harold Macmillan decides against divorce

1929 Italian writer Alberto Moravia wins success with his first novel, The Time of Indifference

1929 Margaret Bondfield becomes the first woman to sit in the British cabinet, as minister of labour

1929 US astronomer Edwin Hubble uses the red shift of light from galaxies to demonstrate that they are receding from each other and the universe is expanding

1929 Alfred Hitchcock directs Blackmail, the first British talkie, with a climax on the roof of the British Museum

1929 Ernest Hemingway publishes A Farewell to Arms, closely reflecting his own wartime experiences

1929 Hollywood stars Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr marry

1929 Russia adopts a Five Year Plan aiming to boost industrial output by 200% within that period

1929 Labour is the largest party in the UK parliament but still has no overall majority, so Ramsay MacDonald forms his second minority government

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1929 In the general election Harold Macmillan loses Stockton-on-Tees to the Labour candidate, Frederick Riley

1929 Vladimir Mayakovsky's play The Bedbug is directed in Moscow by Meyerhold with incidental music by Shostakovich

1929 Alexander, king of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, gives his kingdom the less cumbersome name of Yugoslavia

1929 Richard Hughes publishes his first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica

1929 On St Valentine's Day six members of the Bugs Moran gang in Chicago are lined up against a wall and machine-gunned by rival gangsters

1929 French author Jean Cocteau publishes Les Enfants Terribles, a novel about a brother and sister in a suffocatingly claustrophobic relationsip

1929 The Lateran Treaty, between the Holy See and the state of Italy, establishes the Vatican City as a free state within the wider nation

1929 Stalin concludes his long-standing rivalry with Trotsky, expelling him from the USSR three years after removing him from the Politburo

1929 The Tintin comic strip, by Hergé, begins with Tintin in the Land of the Soviets

1929 Sartoris is the first of 14 novels by William Faulkner set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County

1929 The SS, which has evolved from Hitler's personal bodyguard, is put under the command of Heinrich Himmler

1928 British inventor John Logie Baird secures a patent for fibreoptic imaging

1928 English sculptor Henry Moore has his first solo exhibition, at the Warren Gallery in London

1928 Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness is the first to deal openly with a lesbian subject

1928 Evelyn Waugh succeeds with a comic first novel, Decline and Fall

1928 D.H. Lawrence's new novel, in which Lady Chatterley is in love with her husband's gamekeeper, is privately printed in Florence

1928 Norwegian figure-skater Sonja Henie wins the first of three individual Olympic gold medals in successive games

1928 Republican candidate Herbert Hoover wins the US presidential election with the

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slogan 'a chicken in every pot'

1928 All non-Fascist political activity is banned in Italy, parliament being replaced with the Fascist Grand Council

1928 Karol Szymanowski's Stabat Mater is performed in Warsaw and brings him international fame

1928 Eric Fenby devotes himself to Frederick Delius, taking dictation to write down the scores of the blind composer's new works

1928 Set in a World War I trench, the play Journey's End reflects the wartime experiences of its British author, R.Sherriff

1928 García Lorca wins fame with his book of poems Gypsy Ballads

1928 The Threepenny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, opens to great acclaim in Berlin

1928 Ballerina Galina Ulanova graduates from the Leningrad Choreography School and joins the Maryinsky company

1928 The Kellogg-Briand Pact is drawn up by the US and France as a pledge to renounce war

1928 US anthropologist Margaret Mead makes much of trouble-free sex among natives, in Coming of Age in Samoa, but her findings are subsequently disputed

1928 Stalin achieves complete personal control in the USSR after removing all his rivals from the Politburo

1928 Australian police massacre Aborigines near Coniston in reprisal for a murder

1928 Russian author Mikhail Sholokhov publishes the first section of And Quiet Flows the Don

1928 The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, has its premiere on Broadway

1928 Maurice Ravel writes Boléro as music for a ballet choreographed by Nijinska with designs by Benois

1928 Jomo Kenyatta becomes the editor of Muigwithania, the newspaper of the Kikuyu Central Association

1928 English sculptor Barbara Hepworth has her first solo exhibition, at the Beaux Arts gallery in London

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1928 Stephen V. Benét publishes a verse narrative of the Civil War under the title John Brown's Body

1928 A second anti-Communist coup enables Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) to set up a National Government in Nanjing

1928 Siegfried Sassoon publishes Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the first volume of a semi-autobiographical trilogy

1928 The age limit for British women to vote is lowered to 21, finally giving them parity with men

1928 Caribbean-born author Jean Rhys publishes her first novel, Postures, based on her affair with the writer Ford Madox Ford

1928 Maxim Gorky returns to the USSR to a rapturous reception after seven years abroad

1928 Marcel Breuer, working at the Bauhaus, designs the classic version of his tubular- steel cantilever chair their homesr

1928 W.B. Yeats's new volume of poems, The Tower, includes 'Sailing to Byzantium'

1928 Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovers a mould that selectively kills bacteria, and calls it penicillin

1928 George Balanchine creates Apollo for Ballets Russes, to music by Igor Stravinksy

1928 Mickey Mouse makes his first appearance in Walt Disney's short animated film Steamboat Willie

1928 Gershwin's orchestral work An American in Paris (with parts for four taxi-horns) has its first performance in New York

1928 Beijing falls to Kuomintang forces, extending the rule of Jiang Jieshi's National Government into the north of China

1928 Alvaro Obregón, the leading figure in Mexico's anti-clerical revolution, is shot by a Roman Catholic assassin

1928 An Aerial Medical Service is launched in Queensland, Australia, subsequently becoming the Flying Doctor Service

1928 English sculptor Henry Moore receives his first public commission, for the headquarters of London Underground

1928 English psychologist Henry Havelock Ellis completes a thirty-year project, his 7- volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex

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1928 Ninette De Valois creates her first ballet, Les Petits Riens, at the Old Vic

1928 'Pine Top' Smith records Pinetop's Boogie-Woogie, the first recording to be labelled boogie-woogie

1928 Le Corbusier and other modernist architects set up the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM)

1928 Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali make Un Chien andalou, a surrealist film specifically designed to shock

1928 In only his third Test match, 20-year-old Australian cricketer Donald Bradman scores a century

1927 It is estimated that in approximately 1927 the population of the world reached two billion

1927 Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern open on Broadway with an immensely influential American musical, Show Boat

1927 Stanley Spencer begins his murals in the Memorial Chapel for Henry Sandham at Burghclere, in Hampshire

1927 Mysterious German author B. Traven writes a novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, about three Americans searching for a lost gold mine in Mexico

1927 Stuttgart's Weissenhofsiedlung, designed by Mies van der Rohe, le Corbusier, Gropius and others, sets a defining standard for International Modernism

1927 Leos Janacek's Glagolitic Mass has its first performance in his home town, Brno

1927 Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch demonstrates that bees communicate the whereabouts of food by means of a dance

1927 11-year-old Yehudi Menuhin gives a sensational performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the Carnegie Hall, conducted by Fritz Busch

1927 President Coolidge issues a famously terse statement: 'I do not choose to run for President in 1928'

1927 Don Marquis publishes archy and mehitabel, the first collection of his sketches about archy the cockroach and mehitabel the alley cat

1927 The Scottish National War Memorial, designed by Robert Lorimer, is unveiled in Edinburgh Castle

1927 Irish author Frank Harris publishes the fourth and final volume of My Life and Loves

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1927 William Randolph Hearst by now owns a nation-wide string of some 28 daily newspapers

1927 Isadora Duncan dies in Nice when her scarf tangles in the wheel of a Bugatti sports car, breaking her neck

1927 Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy star together for the first time in the silent film Duck Soup

1927 Archaeologists, excavating the bison remains at Folsom, find an ancient spear point embedded in the skeleton - first proof of the Folsom culture

1927 Virginia Woolf uses a Hebridean holiday as the setting for her narrative in To The Lighthouse

1927 Although not the first film with synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer with in the title role does much to popularize the 'talkies'

1927 In spite of widespread protest and grave judicial doubt Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are sent to the electric chair

1927 De Valera and his party, the Fianna Fáil, finally take their seats in the Dáil

1927 Gutzon Borglum begins the massive task of carving portraits of four US presidents in the rock face at Mount Rushmore

1927 Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen publishes her first novel, The Hotel

1927 In Being and Time German philosopher Martin Heidegger makes an existentialist case with Dasein ('Being There') as the central theme

1927 Hermann Hesse publishes a mystical novel, Steppenwolf, based on the concept of a double personality

1927 DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy, dramatized with a new title by himself and his wife Dorothy, has a great success on Broadway and in London

1927 Irish Free State president Kevin O'Higgins is murdered by members of the IRA on his way to mass

1927 Henry Williamson wins a wide readership with Tarka the Otter, a realistic story of the life and death of an otter in Devon

1927 The fossilized tooth of a human, half a million years old and known now as Peking Man, is discovered at a site near Beijing

1927 US golfer Walter Hagen wins his fifth PGA Championship, and the fourth in

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succession

1927 Achmed Sukarno becomes the first chairman of the new Indonesian Nationalist Party

1927 US aviator Charles Lindbergh, in his single-engine plane Spirit of St Louis, flies solo across the Atlantic from New York to Paris

1927 US author Thornton Wilder achieves world-wide success with his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

1927 Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill write Mahagonny Songspiel for the Baden-Baden music festival

1927 Mussolini's treaty with Ahmed Zogu gives Fascist Italy a dominant position in Albania

1927 Stalin expels from the Communist party his main opponents, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky

1927 The Australian parliament moves from Melbourne to a temporary Parliament House in the new federal capital at Canberra

1927 Werner Heisenberg publishes his Uncertainty Principle, declaring that it is impossible to define precisely the position and momentum of a sub-atomic particle

1927 British archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovers the treasures of the royal cemetery at Ur

1927 Right-wing Chinese army officer Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) launches an anti- Communist coup in the Canton region

1927 Mae West is sentenced to eight days in gaol when Sex, written, produced and starred in by herself on Broadway, is judged to be obscene

1927 French author François Mauriac publishes a novel of marital claustrophobia, Thérèse Desqueyroux

1927 The Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte has his first one-man show, at the Galerie Centaure in Brussels

1927 Austrian director Fritz Lang creates a wildly ambitious silent film, Metropolis, the commercial failure of which bankrupts its studio

1927 Communists seize power in Jiangxi province and establish the first soviet republic in China

1927 English typographer Eric Gill designs a type face without serifs, commissioned by

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Monotype and to be known as Gill Sans-Serif

1927 Clara Bow stars in It, the silent film that gives her her famous nickname – the 'It' Girl

1927 US dancer and choreographer Martha Graham opens a School of Contemporary Dance in New York

1927 Ernst Krenek's jazz opera Jonny Strikes Up has its premiere in Leipzig

1927 28-year old Staffordshire potter Clarice Cliff launches a range of highly coloured geometric designs that she calls Bizarre Ware

1927 Stanley Spencer completes his large visionary canvas The Resurrection: Cookham

1926 Orleans House is demolished to allow for gravel extraction. The Octagon and stables are bought by the Hon Mrs Nellie Ionides and saved from demolition.

1926 US author Ernest Hemingway succeeds with his second novel, The Sun also Rises (also known as Fiesta)

1926 Leos Janacek's opera The Makropoulos Affair, based on the play by Karel Capek, has its first performance in Brno

1926 Walter Gropius designs buildings in Dessau as a new home for the Bauhaus

1926 Jean Sibelius's tone-poemTapiola has its premiere in New York

1926 23-year-old US crooner Bing Crosby makes his first record, singing I''ve Got the Girl with the Paul Whiteman band

1926 The Balfour Report, by former UK prime minister A.J. Balfour, suggests the way forward for the British Commonwealth of Nations

1926 Béla Bartók's ballet The Miraculous Mandarin has its premiere (in Cologne) some eight years after he began work on it

1926 English choreographer Frederick Ashton creates his first ballet, A Tragedy of Fashion

1926 Mies van der Rohe designs a monument in Berlin for the Spartacus leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg

1926 Rudolf von Laban publishes a new system of dance notation, which becomes known in English as Labanotation

1926 Zoltán Kodály's opera Háry J´nos has its first performance in Budapest

1926 Ely Culbertson devotes his playing skill and his promotional abilities to the new

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contract version of bridge

1926 Jelly Roll Morton and his new group of seven, the Red Hot Peppers, record their first classic, Black Bottom Stomp

1926 The England cricketer Jack Hobbs makes the highest score of his career, 316 not out for Surrey against Middlesex

1926 Russian World War I pilot Sergey Ilyushin begins a distinguished career as an aircraft designer

1926 Dorothy Parker has a best-seller with her first collection of verse, Enough Rope

1926 Don Juan, starring John Barrymore, has a synchronized musical score, making it the earliest example of a film with a sound track

1926 Franz Kafka's novel The Castle is published posthumously

1926 A coup in Portugal brings in a military dictatorship, in which general António Óscar de Fragoso Carmona soon emerges as the leader

1926 25-year-old Hirohito succeeds to the imperial throne of Japan after five years as prince regent

1926 Germany joins the League of Nations, with a permanent seat on the council

1926 The Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) is established by the Nazi party for teenage boys

1926 Eamon de Valera's faction, Fianna Fáil (Warriors of Ireland), enters mainstream Irish life as a political party

1926 Leos Janacek completes his powerfully scored orchestral work Sinfonietta

1926 Karel Szymanowski's opera King Roger has its first performance in Warsaw

1926 Hugh MacDiarmid writes his long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle in a revived version of the Lallans dialect of the Scottish borders

1926 Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí dies after being hit by a tram, with his masterpiece the Sagrada Familia unfinished

1926 Irish dancer Ninette de Valois, recently with the Ballets Russes, opens a ballet school in London

1926 British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington compares mass and luminosity in The Internal Constitution of the Stars

1926 Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and the others make their first appearance in A.A. Milne's

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Winnie-the-Pooh

1926 19-year-old Dmitry Shostakovich wins immediate attention with the public performance of his first symphony, his graduation piece from Leningrad Conservatory

1926 The Trades Union Congress calls off Britain's general strike after nine days

1926 The prime minister Stanley Baldwin uses BBC radio to broadcast a conciliatory message to the workers in Britain's general strike

1926 To explain the irregular movement of stars, Swedish astronomer Bertil Lindblad proposes the theory that our galaxy rotates

1926 A general strike begins in Britain in support of the striking miners

1926 T.E. Lawrence publishes privately his autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom, describing his part in the Arab uprising

1926 Patrick Abercrombie publishes The Preservation of Rural England, calling for rural planning to prevent the encroachment of towns

1926 French author André Gide publishes his only novel, The Counterfeiters

1926 Miners go on strike in Britain in protest against employers' attempts to reduce wages

1926 The Austrian architect Adolf Loos builds a house in Paris for the Romanian dadaist poet Tristan Tzara

1926 Soldiers Pay is the first published novel of the Mississippi author William Faulkner

1926 Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel publishes a collection of stories, Red Cavalry, based on his own experiences in the army

1926 John Logie Baird gives the world's first demonstration of television to a group assembled in his attic rooms in London

1926 English potter Michael Cardew sets up a studio at Winchcombe, in Gloucestershire

1925 Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck has its premiere in Berlin

1925 African-American singer and dancer Josephine Baker is jazz hot in La Revue Nègre in Paris

1925 Treaties signed at Locarno, in Switzerland, aim to stabilize and guarantee Germany's borders with France and Belgium

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1925 Reza Khan, by now prime minister of Iran, mounts a second coup to depose the last Qajar shah and begin his own Pahlavi dynasty

1925 British jockey Gordon Richards becomes champion jockey for the first of 26 times

1925 A round table at the Algonquin Hotel in New York becomes famous for its collection of wits

1925 Film actress Greta Garbo and her director Maurits Stiller move from Sweden to Hollywood

1925 Italian poet Eugenio Montale publishes his first collection, Bones of the Cuttlefish

1925 Virgiinia Woolf publishes her novel Mrs Dalloway, in which the action is limited to a single day

1925 A.J. Cook, leader of Britain's miners, insists 'Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day'

1925 The RSS party, from which the present Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) derives, is established in India by Keshava Baliram Hedgewar

1925 The German navy adapts a civilian encryption machine, Enigma, for military purposes

1925 Biology teacher John Scopes is prosecuted for breaking state law by teaching evolution to his class of children in Dayton, Tennessee

1925 Irish novelist Liam O'Flaherty publishes The Informer

1925 Anton Webern again follows Schoenberg, this time into serialism, when he adopts the 12-note method for his Three Traditional Rhymes

1925 English writer Ivy Compton-Burnett finds her characteristic voice in her second novel, Pastors and Masters

1925 Franz Kafka's novel The Trial is published posthumously

1925 A Protocol signed in Geneva probibits the use in warfare of poisonous gas and bacteriological weapons

1925 Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli formulates his exclusion principle, stating that no two electrons in an atom can have the same four quantum numbers

1925 A fashionable new style, Art Deco, derives its name from a Paris exhibition called the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs Industriels et Modernes

1925 The Broadway revue Garrick Gaieties is the first big success for Rodgers and Hart

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1925 Plaid Cymru, the 'party of Wales', is founded in a temperance hotel in Pwllheli during the National Eisteddfod

1925 Maurice Ravel and Colette provide music and libretto for the opera The Child and the Enchantments

1925 House by the Railroad, by US painter Edward Hopper, introduces a new style of urban realism

1925 Britain and other nations return to a revived version of the gold standard, under the new name of Gold Exchange Standard

1925 26-year-old Al Capone takes over the Johnny Torrio gangster organization in Chicago

1925 The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein completes his film about the 1905 revolution, The Battleship Potemkin

1925 Field marshal Paul von Hindenburg is elected president of the Weimar Republic in Germany

1925 23-year-old German physicist Werner Heisenberg publishes his ground-breaking theory of quantum mechanics

1925 DuBose Heyward publishes his first novel, Porgy, set in Charleston's Catfish Row

1925 Scott FitzGerald publishes his novel The Great Gatsby, set in a contemporary world of lavish indulgence underpinned by crime

1925 The first volume of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is published

1925 Strawberry Hill is sold to the Catholic Education Council and becomes known as St Mary's College, later St Mary's University College.

1925 Harold Ross founds The New Yorker as a humorous weekly, and remains in charge of it until his death in 1951

1925 Trumpeter Louis Armstrong, in Chicago, forms the Hot Five with his wife on piano and three New Orleans musicians on trombone, clarinet and guitar

1925 The Central Committee of the USSR removes Trotsky from his influential post as War Commissar

1925 Benito Mussolini arrests opposition politicians, takes control of the press and assumes dictatorial powers in Italy

1925 Charlie Chaplin makes The Gold Rush, involving his little tramp in the horrors of

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wintry Alaska

1924 Christopher Robin features for the first time in A.A. Milne's When We Were Very Young

1924 E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India builds on cultural misconceptions between the British and Indian communities

1924 The first omnibus service starts to Twickenham rugby ground, and the RFU buys 7 more acres of land

1924 Giacomo Puccini dies without finishing his opera Turandot, which is subsequently completed by Franco Alfani

1924 Calvin Coolidge is elected US president in his own right, winning by a wide margin over Democrat John W. Davis

1924 US poet E.A. Robinson publishes a narrative poem, The Man Who Died Twice, about the dissipation of artistic talent

1924 Leos Janacek's opera The Cunning Little Vixen, based on verses by Rudolf Tesnohlídek, is premiered in Brno

1924 Harold Macmillan stands again for Stockton-on-Tees and this time wins the seat with a majority of 3215

1924 A massive Conservative victory in the UK general election follows publication of the forged Zinoviev letter, and Baldwin returns as prime minister

1924 7-year-old Yehudi Menuhin gives his first professional recital, playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in San Francisco

1924 20-year-old Chilean poet Pablo Neruda publishes one of his best-known collections, Twenty Love Poems

1924 Four Scottish Colourists (Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter, Peploe) exhibit together in Paris

1924 Erich von Stroheim completes Greed, his epic silent film of ferociously competitive acquisition in turn-of-the-century San Francisco

1924 The British government takes on the administration of Northern Rhodesia from the British South Africa Company

1924 Ottorino Respighi's symphonic poem Pines of Rome has its first performance in Rome

1924 A new German currency, the Reichsmark, is launched with the value of a trillion old

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marks

1924 André Breton launches a new movement with his Manifesto of surrealism - Soluble fish

1924 German scientist Felix Wankel builds a model of a rotary engine, thirty years before the first prototype is manufactured

1924 German author Thomas Mann publishes his novel The Magic Mountain

1924 brings together (choreography), (music), and Coco Chanel (costumes)

1924 The League of Nations grants Belgium a mandate to administer the former Germany colony of Ruanda-Urundi

1924 Gracie Fields makes her name when she appears in London as Sally Perkins in the musical Mr Tower of London

1924 US poet Robinson Jeffers publishes his first successful collection, Tamar and Other Poems

1924 The Marx Brothers (at this stage Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Gummo) make their Broadway debut with the show I'll Say She Is

1924 The British rugby team touring South Africa are for the first time called the Lions

1924 US astronomer Edwin Hubble proves that the nebula Andromeda is vastly further away than other stars and can only be a separate galaxy

1924 Max Brod disregards Franz Kafka's dying instruction to destroy all his manuscripts

1924 Swimmer Johnny Weissmuller wins three Olympic gold medals in the Paris games, together with a bronze in water polo

1924 The ‘New Star & Garter Home’, designed by Edwin Cooper, is opened by King George V and Queen Mary

1924 The Italian Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti is murdered by Mussolini's Fascists

1924 Sean O'Casey's second play Juno and the Paycock is performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin

1924 James Hertzog's National Party, committed to protecting white privilege, comes to power in South Africa

1924 Britain's most prestigious steeplechase, the Cheltenham Gold Cup, is run for the first time

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1924 Clarence Birdseye, having eaten frozen fish in the Arctic, launches Birdseye Seafoods in New York

1924 George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue has its first performance, at the Aeolian Hall in New York

1924 Following the death of Sir Ratan Tata in 1918, his widow sells York house and its contents to the Twickenham Urban District Council for use as council offices.

1924 A general election brings in Britain's first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, at the head of a minority government

1924 Lenin's death is followed by an intense power struggle in the Kremlin between Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev

1924 Winston Churchill, accepting the position of chancellor of the exchequer in Baldwin's cabinet, returns to the Conservative party

1923 Paul Hindemith sets Rainer Maria Rilke's song-cycle Das Marienleben

1923 Harold Macmillan stands as the Conservative candidate for the Liberal seat of Stockton-on-Tees and is defeated by 73 votes

1923 Rudolf Hess suggests to Hitler the policy of Lebensraum or 'living space' for the German people

1923 Adolf Hitler dictates Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess in their shared prison cell after the failed Munich putsch

1923 Rainer Maria Rilke publishes his Duino Elegies and his Sonnets to Orpheus

1923 Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231, inspired by the sounds of a steam train, has its first performance in Paris

1923 Hermann Goering is wounded in the aftermath of the Munich beer hall putsch, but unlike Hitler manages to escape

1923 Adolf Hitler's beer-cellar putsch ends in ignominious failure, as he turns and flees under fire

1923 Adolf Hitler, launching a putsch in a Munich beer cellar, announces the birth of a new national government

1923 Turkey becomes a republic with Atatürk as president and Ankara as its new capital

1923 Sigmund Freud proposes a new interpretation of the mind in his book The Ego and the Id

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1923 Zoltan Kod´ly's work for tenor, chorus and orchestra, Psalmus Hungaricus, has its first performance in Budapest

1923 Margaret Bondfield is the first woman to be chairman of Britain's Trades Union Congress

1923 Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan has its world premiere in New York

1923 Vegemite is launched in Melbourne as Australia's answer to Marmite

1923 Le Corbusier publishes an influential collection of his articles under the title Towards a New Architecture

1923 US dramatist Elmer Rice establishes his reputation with The Adding Machine, an expressionistic drama about the machine age

1923 The gentleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey makes his first appearance in Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body?

1923 Warren Harding is succeeded as US president by his vice-president, Calvin Coolidge

1923 Warren Harding dies little more than half way through his term of office as US president

1923 In I and Thou the Austrian theologian Martin Buber interprets religion in terms of the subjective experience of interpersonal relationships

1923 The Treaty of Lausanne, with more favourable terms than those negotiated at Sèvres, finally brings peace between Turkey and the Allies

1923 The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) officially comes into being, with a newly written constitution

1923 Germany's communists organise uprisings in Saxony, Thuringia and Hamburg

1923 Maxim Gorky publishes My Universities, completing his autobiographical trilogy

1923 Sean O'Casey's first play The Shadow of a Gunman is performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin

1923 US poet Edna St Vincent Millay publishes The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems

1923 Arnold Schoenberg's Suite for piano is his first piece entirely in the 12-note serial method

1923 German inflation reaches fantasy levels, at 242 million marks to the dollar

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1923 The US poet e.e. cummings publishes his first collection, Tulips and Chimneys

1923 The Italian novelist Italo Svevo has his first great success when The Confessions of Zeno is published in France

1923 Robert Frost publishes a new collection of poems, New Hampshire

1923 Albert Roussel's opera-ballet Padmâvâti is premiered in Paris

1923 Rhodesia becomes a self-governing colony with political power exclusively in the hands of European settlers

1923 Stanley Baldwin becomes UK premier and leader of the Conservative party after ill health compels to resign

1923 Wallace Stevens' first collection, Harmonium, sells 100 copies

1923 De Valera and his followers do well in elections to the Dáil but decline to take their seats

1923 Marcel Duchamp completes his large glass construction The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even

1923 The African National Congress (ANC) is formed in South Africa by renaming the South African National Native Congress

1923 Bessie Smith has a big hit with her first record, Downhearted Blues, selling two million copies within a year

1923 Henry Luce has an immediate success with a new magazine, calling it simply Time

1923 Military leader Miguel Primo de Rivera takes power in Spain in a military coup

1923 Garrick's Villa Estate is split up and auctioned. Garrick's Temple and Temple Lawn are sold to Paul Glaize who builds a house, Temple House, joined onto the Temple

1923 Lenin's third stroke prevents the publication of his Testament, which urges upon the party the removal of Stalin

1923 Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges publishes his first collection of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires ('Fervour of Buenos Aires')

1923 With Mussolini already installed as Il Duce, his party wins 65% of the votes in a general election

1923 France, with Belgian support, occupies Germany's industrial heartland in the Ruhr

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1923 De Valera and the IRA lay down their arms, bringing to an end the Irish civil war

1923 Benito Mussolini sets up a Fascist Grand Council as a token assembly to conceal his authoritarian rule

1923 The Czech novelist Jaroslav Hasek dies with his masterpiece, The Good Soldier Schweik, incomplete

1922 Canadian physiologists Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate insulin from the pancreas for the treatment of diabetes

1922 At a congress in Moscow four soviet republics (Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine and the Transcaucasian Republic) agree to unite

1922 William Thomas Cosgrave becomes the first prime minister of the Irish Free State

1922 With the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the 26 counties of southern Ireland formally become the Irish Free State

1922 Lenin has a second stroke, putting him finally out of action in political terms

1922 Valéry's collection Charmes includes probably his best-known poem, 'Le Cimetière marin'

1922 Erskine Childers is sent before a firing squad in the Irish Free State for possession of a revolver

1922 The Labour party, winning 142 seats and beating the Liberals into third place, becomes for the first time the official UK opposition

1922 The Conservatives under Andrew Bonar Law win 347 seats in the British general election, giving them a large majority

1922 The British Broadcasting company launches a regular broadcasting service from the Marconi 2LO studio in London

1922 Howard Carter exposes a flight of steps in the Valley of the Kings and comes to a barrier bearing the name Tutankhamun

1922 The nationalist government in Turkey abolishes the sultanate and the last Ottoman emperor, Mehmed VI, goes into exile

1922 Columns of blackshirts, brought into Rome for the day, before Mussolini and the king

1922 A triumphant Mussolini arrives in Rome on the overnight train from Milan to take up his appointment as prime minister

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1922 The Italian king Victor Emmanuel III, alarmed at the prospect of a Fascist march on Rome, asks Mussolini to form a government

1922 German film director Ernst Lubitsch moves to Hollywood, at the request of Mary Pickford

1922 Mussolini gives orders for armed squads to congregate around Rome, in preparation for a march to seize power in the capital

1922 Lloyd George loses his majority in the House of Commons when the Conservatives vote in a meeting to withdraw from his coalitiion

1922 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk wins a long campaign to expel the Greeks, authorized by the victorious Allies to occupy western Turkey

1922 American-born poet T.S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land, an extremely influential poem in five fragmented sections

1922 The Teapot Dome scandal reveals corruption in the administration of US president Warren Harding

1922 The German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler is appointed to the Berlin Philharmonic, and spends most of the rest of his life with the orchestra

1922 The League of Nations gives France and Britain mandates to govern separate areas of the German colony of Cameroon

1922 After Michael Collins is killed in an ambush, William Cosgrave and Kevin O'Higgins emerge as leaders of the Irish Free State

1922 The Irish Free State takes stringent measures against rebel terrorism, making possession even of a pistol a capital offence

1922 John Galsworthy publishes his novels about the Forsyte family as a joint collection under the title The Forsyte Saga

1922 The Broadway show Ziegfeld Follies features an exciting new dance, the Charleston

1922 Thomas Mann publishes a fragment of his Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

1922 Stalin devises the structure for a new federal state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)

1922 Boris Pasternak makes his name with his third volume of poems, My Sister Life

1922 John Reith becomes general manager of the newly formed British Broadcasting Company

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1922 Bitter war breaks out between factions of the IRA supporting and opposing the Anglo-Irish Treaty

1922 US golfer Walter Hagen wins the first of his four victories in the British Open

1922 Linus Pauling, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, begins t heoretical work on the nature of the chemical bond

1922 Germany is the first nation to re-establish full diplomatic relations with Russia

1922 In elections to the Dáil the pro-treaty faction of Collins and Griffith defeats the opposition, led by de Valera

1922 British manufacturer Herbert Austin launches Britain's first car for the popular market, the Austin Seven or 'Baby Austin'

1922 Sinclair Lewis creates an archetypal character in George Folanshee Babbitt, a real- estate broker in the midwestern town of Zenith

1922 William Walton and Edith Sitwell give a private performance of their entertainment Façade, setting poems by Sitwell

1922 The League of Nations introduces the Nansen Passport for stateless persons

1922 Virginia Woolf writes to Clive Bell admitting 'theft' from James Strachey

1922 D.H. Lawrence takes a house in Sydney, where he writes the bulk of his novel Kangaroo

1922 Winston Churchill buys Chartwell, a house in Kent that remains his home until his death

1922 Marina Tsvetaeva completes an anti-Soviet cycle of poems, The Encampment of the Swans

1922 Diego Rivera, returning from his study of Italian frescoes, begins the first of his influential murals depicting Mexican history

1922 Wassily Kandinsky takes up a teaching post at the Bauhaus in Weimar

1922 Garrick's Villa is divided into seven flats by Flora Hutchinson

1922 The US architectural critic Lewis Mumford publishes The Story of Utopias, the first of his many influential works

1922 Lenin has a stroke, removing him for five months from active control of party and state

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1922 The reputation of UK prime minister Lloyd George suffers severely when he is accused of selling peerages so as to build up a personal political fund

1922 Lenin creates a powerful new post for Joseph Stalin, as General Secretary of the Communist Party

1922 French fashion designer Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel introduces a very successful perfume, calling it Chanel No. 5

1922 Mahatma Gandhi is arrested by the British in India as an agitator and is sentenced to six years in prison

1922 Egypt becomes an independent kingdom, subject to a British military presence to protect the Suez canal

1922 Robert J. Flaherty lives with the Inuit in the Arctic to make his dramatized documentary Nanook of the North

1922 De Witt Wallace and his wife, working from home, publish the first issue of Reader's Digest

1922 The Marconi company in England pioneers a regular broadcasting service from its 2MT radio station near Chelmsford

1922 Ambrogio Ratti is elected pope and takes the name Pius XI

1922 James Joyce's novel Ulysses is published in Paris, by Sylvia Beach, because of censorship problems elsewhere

1921 November 11 The first of America's 'unknown soldiers' is placed in the new Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery

1921 Agnes Macphail becomes the first woman to sit in Canada's parliament

1921 W.L. Mackenzie King begins a nine-year spell as Canadian prime minister, albeit with a brief interruption in 1926

1921 Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie is performed in New York

1921 Janacek's opera Kátya Kabanová, based on Ostrovsky's play The Storm, has its premiere in Brno

1921 Taras Bulba, a rhapsody for orchestra by Leos Janacek, is first performed in Brno

1921 Ludwig Wittgenstein publishes his influential study of the philosophy of logic, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

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1921 Marianne Moore calls her first published collection simply Poems

1921 Abd-el-Krim wins a sensational victory over Spanish forces in Morocco and gains control of the Rif

1921 The British airship R-38 bursts into flames on its fourth flight and crashes into the Humber

1921 Somerset Maugham's short story 'Rain' (in his collection The Trembling of a Leaf) introduces the lively American prostitute Sadie Thompson

1921 Faisal, having lost Syria, is given the throne in the British mandated territory of Iraq

1921 Italian sex symbol Rudolph Valentino has two sensational hits within the same year, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik

1921 The British parliament ratifies the Anglo-Irish treaty, but de Valera repudiates it and resigns as president of the Dáil

1921 Tulsa race riots cap previous levels of violence, with more than eighty-five blacks killed

1921 Mao Zedong leads a delegation to the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai

1921 Italian immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti are convicted of murder in a US trial flawed by prejudice

1921 Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the Nazi party, which now has about 3000 members

1921 The Swiss architect Le Corbusier begins a 20-year partnership with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret

1921 The Anglo-Irish Treaty, agreed in London, ends the war between the British army and the IRA

1921 Envoys sent to London by de Valera agree independence for southern Ireland as the Irish Free State, with Dominion status

1921 James Craig (later Lord Craigavon) begins a 19-year term as prime minister of the new province of Northern Ireland

1921 The Parliament of Northern Ireland convenes for the first time

1921 Russian author Maxim Gorky goes abroad for medical treatment and lives for the next seven years in Italy

1921 The Czech playwright Karel Capek gives the world the term 'robot', in the title of his

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play Rossum's Universal Robots

1921 Franklin Delano Roosevelt is paralyzed from the waist down by polio

1921 Paul Klee becomes a teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar

1921 The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland appoints James Craig the first prime minister of the new Northern Ireland Parliament

1921 Alfred Adler, in Vienna, opens the first of many child-guidance clinics

1921 The Young Kikuyu Association is formed in Kenya, to fight for African rights and the restoration of Kikuyu land

1921 The Sinn Fein members of southern Ireland's new parliament assemble on their own, under the name Dáil Eireann (Assembly of Ireland)

1921 Mussolini and 35 of his Fascist colleagues win seats in the Italian parliament

1921 The republican party Sinn Fein is unopposed in southern Ireland's first general election, and so wins every available seat in the Dail

1921 Within a five-week period the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello writes two masterpieces, Six Characters in Search of an Author immediately followed by Henry IV

1921 Some 50,000 peasants are herded into Russia's first concentration camps

1921 The commission considering the level of Germany's war reparations to the Allies decides on $33 billion

1921 In a major economic U-turn, Lenin's New Economic Policy allows peasants to hold markets and sell the surplus of their product

1921 Abdullah ibn Hussein, of the Hashemite family, becomes emir of the new province of Transjordan

1921 Marie Stopes and her husband set up in London a Mothers' Clinic for Birth Control, the first of its kind in Britain

1921 With massive force, and huge casualties, Lenin puts an end to a naval mutiny at Kronstadt

1921 The first traces are found of a major but entirely forgotten civilization in the Indus valley

1921 An army officer, Reza Khan, becomes war minister after seizing control of Tehran with his Cossack brigade

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1921 James Craig succeeds Edward Carson as leader of the in northern Ireland

1921 The schooner Bluenose begins a long series of international racing victories for Canada

1920 November 11 The body of an unknown French soldier is laid to rest in a chapel within the Arc deTriomphe in Paris, and a few weeks later is buried at ground level beneath the arch

1920 November 11 The body of an Unknown Warrior, selected at random from British war graves, is buried at the entrance to Westminster Abbey

1920 August 10 The sultan of Turkey signs the Treaty of Sèvres with the Allies but it is rejected by the new nationalist government

1920 August A punitive peace treaty, negotiated at Sèvres, is designed to dismember the Ottoman empire

1920 May League of Nations mandates give France responsibility for Syria and Lebanon

1920 May League of Nations mandates give Britain responsibility for Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine

1920 The American novelist Sinclair Lewis has his first major success with Main Street, an unflattering portrayal of American village life

1920 On his return to Britain from the far east, Bernard Leach sets up a pottery studio in St Ives

1920 Italian troops drive Gabriele d'Annunzio and his followers from Fiume, which they have occupied for more than a year

1920 Ten years of violent revolution in Mexico are brought to and end in a successful coup by Alvaro Obregón

1920 The IRA and the British security forces clash during a violent 'Bloody Sunday' in Dublin

1920 The civil war ends as the last White army on Russian soil escapes from the Crimea

1920 Warren Harding wins the US presidential election for the Republicans

1920 The marriage of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks is a Hollywood sensation after a three-year affair

1920 The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot features in Agatha Christie's first book, The

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Mysterious Affair at Styles

1920 Douglas Fairbanks makes the first of his swashbuckling adventure movies, The Mark of Zorro

1920 New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies publishes a pioneering text book, Plastic Surgery of the Face

1920 Gustav Holst's Hymn of Jesus has its premiere in London, conducted by the composer

1920 The brutal behaviour of the British police reinforcements, the Black and Tans, aggravates the violence in Ireland

1920 A group of composers in Paris - Auric, Durey, Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc and Tailleferre - become known as ''

1920 The Marconi studio in the English town of Chelmsford broadcasts Dame Nellie Melba live to Europe and to ships on the Atlantic

1920 The Government of Ireland Act provides for separate devolved parliaments in southern Ireland and the six counties of Ulster

1920 D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, a continuation of the family story in The Rainbow, is published first in the USA

1920 A Chilean poet, Ricardo Reyes, adopts the pen name Pablo Neruda

1920 Charles-Édouard Jeanneret launches and edits a radical architectural journal, L'Esprit Nouveau

1920 French intervention in Syria forces Faisal off the throne and out of the country

1920 The German Workers' Party, with Adolf Hitler as one of its leading members, changes its name to the Nazi party

1920 Charles Ives publishes his Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-60, usually known as the Concord Sonata

1920 The Haganah is set up as an underground military organization to protect Jewish settlements in Palestine

1920 Artists dedicated to celebrating the Canadian landscape come together as the Group of Seven

1920 A Communist uprising in the Ruhr is suppressed with difficulty by the German army

1920 Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart work together as Columbia University students,

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creating the musical Fly With Me

1920 The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees women the right to vote

1920 The publication of Scott FitzGerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, brings him instant success

1920 After his marriage, Harold Macmillan leaves the army and joins the family publishing firm

1920 Sapper's patriotic hero makes his first appearance, taking on the villainous Carl Peterson in Bull-dog Drummond

1920 The Meccano company launches the first of its Hornby model trains

1920 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is elected president of Turkey's new Grand National Assembly

1920 The Japanese potter Shoji Hamada accompanies Bernard Leach on his return to England

1920 Destour is formed as a nationalist party in Tunisia, demanding full independence from France

1920 Harold Macmillan marries Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the duke of Devonshire

1920 Bristol-born actor Cary Grant moves to the USA with a troupe of touring tumblers

1920 A national congress in Damascus proclaims Faisal king of an independent Syria

1920 Vladimir Tatlin's model for a gigantic Monument to the Third International becomes one of the most significant examples of Constructivism

1920 Edith Wharton publishes her best-known novel, The Age of Innocence

1920 A plebiscite in Schleswig establishes the border between Denmark and Germany

1920 Marie Rambert, a Polish dancer with the Ballets Russes, opens a ballet school in London

1920 After several less successful novels, the French writer Colette makes her reputation with Chéri

1920 Ezra Pound publishes Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a poem that reflects on the practice of poetry itself

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1920 A right-wing military putsch seizes power for a few days in Berlin

1920 Prohibition comes into effect in the USA, three months after the Volstead Act has provided guidelines for enforcement

1919 Thomas Young's replacement of Pope's Villa is bought by the Sisters of Mercy and becomes St Catherine's School.

1919 To President Wilson's profound disappointment the US Congress, by failing to ratify the treaty of Versailles, opts out of the League of Nations

1919 June 28 German East Africa is to be governed by Britain as Tanganyika, under a League of Nations mandate

1919 June 28 The German-speaking inhabitants of South Tirol are incorporated within Italy under the Versailles peace terms

1919 June 28 The Versailles Treaty provides a corridor of land to give Poland access to Danzig and the Baltic, thereby dividing two parts of Germany

1919 June 28 The Versailles Treaty makes Danzig (or Gdansk) a free city (from 10 January 1920), under the protection of the League of Nations

1919 June 28 The peace-makers in Paris assign the Sudetenland, with its 3.5 million German-speaking inhabitants, to the new republic of Czechoslovakia

1919 June 28 The Versailles Treaty declares that Germany must pay reparations for wartime damages, with the precise amount to be decided by May 1921

1919 June 28 The peace treaty with Germany, ending the world war, is signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles

1919 June 21 German sailors scuttle every one of the fifty warships held by the British in Scapa Flow

1919 April Delegates to the Paris peace conference unanimously establish the League of Nations

1919 February The German assembly meets in Weimar and elects Ebert as president of the new republic

1919 February Hitler returns to Munich and in the prevailing mood of post-defeat resentment begins to take an interest in extremist politics

1919 January I8 The delegates to the peace conference in Paris, mainly concerned with the terms to be imposed on Germany, hold their first session

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1919 January I5 After ten days of street fighting in Berlin, Spartacus leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg are captured and shot

1919 January 6 A vast crowd, assembling in Berlin, calls for a revolution and begins to seize public buildings

1919 January I The Spartacus League transforms itself into the Communist party of Germany

1919 Sherwood Anderson establishes a reputation with a collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio

1919 Boston Red Sox sell their star player, Babe Ruth, to the New York Yankees for $125,000

1919 The prime minister of Poland, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, resigns his post so as to concentrate on his concert career

1919 Darius Milhaud provides the score for Jean Cocteau's pantomime ballet Le Boeuf sur le toit

1919 The phrase Abstract Expressionism is first used, describing the work of Wassily Kandinsky

1919 Canadian National Railways is formed from two of the country's largest rail systems

1919 A White army occupies hills overlooking Petrograd before being driven back by Trotsky

1919 The actors Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin establish United Artists with the director D.W. Griffith

1919 A White army, advancing on Moscow, is stopped about 250 miles from the city

1919 In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes publishes a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany

1919 Marcel Duchamp adds a moustache and beard to a postcard of the Mona Lisa, and gives it the subtly offensive French title LHOOQ

1919 President Woodrow Wilson suffers a severe stroke that renders him largely incapable during the final seventeen months of his presidency

1919 Walter Gropius becomes director of the newly formed Bauhaus in Weimar

1919 Steelworkers go on strike in the US, attempting a major confrontation with industrial management

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1919 The port of Fiume, belonging to Yugoslavia, is seized by Gabriele d'Annunzio and 300 Italian volunteers

1919 On the death of Louis Botha, Jan Smuts succeeds him as prime minister of South Africa

1919 Nancy Astor, as MP for Plymouth, becomes the first woman to take her seat in Britain's House of Commons

1919 Lillian Gish stars as a Cockney girl in D.W. Griffith's inter-racial film romance Broken Blossoms, set in London's slums

1919 Afghanistan finally achieves international recognition as an independent nation

1919 The League of Nations makes South West Africa (Namibia) a mandated British territory, to be administered by South Africa

1919 French poets Louis Aragon and André Breton launch Littérature, a surrealist review

1919 Adolf Hitler joins the tiny German Workers' party, the members of which share his own virulent anti-semitism

1919 At least thirty-eight people are killed in a race riot in Chicago

1919 US boxer Jack Dempsey defeats Jess Willard for the world heavyweight title, sending him from the ring with a broken jaw

1919 Mussolini's Fascist party rapidly acquires an aggressive presence, thanks to his gangs of armed thugs in their blackshirt uniforms

1919 John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown fly from St John's in Newfoundland to Clifden in Ireland

1919 Léonide Massine, Ottorino Respighi and André Derain collaborate on the ballet La Boutique Fantasque

1919 Employers' refusal to allow collective bargaining prompts a general strike in Winnipeg, the largest dispute of its kind in Canada's history

1919 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk leads resistance to the Greek invasion of western Turkey

1919 Music-hall artist Harry Lauder is knighted for his wartime performances entertaining troops at the front

1919 The Soviet system of Gulag slave labour camps is introduced, under the control of the secret service, the Cheka

1919 The Swiss theologian Karl Barth publishes his influential Commentary on Romans,

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taking St Paul's epistle as his text

1919 H.L. Mencken's The American Language traces the gradual evolution of American from English

1919 Edward Elgar completes his last great work, the Cello Concerto in E minor

1919 Mussolini founds the Fasci di Combattimento, dedicated to opposing the Socialist party

1919 Returning from active service with the Royal Navy, Erskine Childers devotes his energies to Sinn Fein and Irish independence

1919 Michael Collins springs de Valera from Lincoln gaol, with the help of a duplicate key

1919 Quia Pauper Amavi contains the first three of Ezra Pound's eventually more than 100 cantos

1919 The armed supporters of Sinn Fein become the IRA, or Irish Republican Army, in Ireland's war of independence

1919 The Sinn Fein members elected to Westminster establish their own parliament in Dublin, the Dáil Eireann (Assembly of Ireland), soon declared illegal by Britain

1919 Composer and pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski becomes prime minister of the newly independent Poland

1919 January 4 Finland wins freedom from Russia and becomes an independent republic

1914-1918 Approximately 7 million civilians are calculated to have died as a direct result of the four years of world war

1914-1918 The Great War has resulted in some 8 million dead in the armed forces of the rival nations

1918 December 1 Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro merge as the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, with the Serbian Peter I as king

1918 November 23 Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, commander of the German army in East Africa, surrenders after four stubborn years of resistance

1918 November 16 Prime minister Mihaly Karolyi proclaims the republic of Hungary, after the demise of Austria-Hungary

1918 November 14 The new nation of Czechoslovakia is established from within Austria- Hungary, with Tomas Masaryk as its first president

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1918 November 13 With the end of the Habsburg empire, German-speaking Austrians declare their own much smaller territory to be an independent republic

1918 November 13 The deposition of the emperor Charles I by the Austrian government brings to a formal end the empire of Austria-Hungary and more than six centuries of Habsburg rule

1918 November 11 The war ends with the official cessation of hostilities at 11 a.m., the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

1918 November 11 The Allies and the Germans finally agree the terms of an armistice at 5 a.m.

1918 November 10 Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and goes into exile in the Netherlands

1918 November 9 The Spartacus League proclaims a rival German republic on soviet lines

1918 November 9 Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Social Democrats, becomes the first chancellor of the newly proclaimed German republic

1918 November 8 The Allied commander-in chief, Marshal Foch, meets a German delegation in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne to discuss an armistice

1918 November 7 Austria-Hungary signs a separate armistice with the Allied powers, in a villa near Padua, without waiting for the Germans

1918 October 30 An armistice is signed between Turkey and the Allies on the warship Agamemnon in the Greek port of Mudros

1918 October 5 The British, under Douglas Haig, break through Germany's heavily defended Hindenburg Line

1918 October 5 The new German chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, sends a message to President Wilson requesting an immediate armistice

1918 October 4 The Kaiser appoints a new chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, to negotiate an end to the war

1918 October 1 After a victory at the historic battle site of Megiddo, Allenby captures the city of Damascus

1918 September 29 The Bulgarians, driven from Serbia, sign an armistice with the Allies

1918 September The Allies, with Serb troops in the vanguard, press north from Salonika into Serbia

1918 August 4 Adolf Hitler is awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, a decoration rarely

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given to a corporal

1918 August A world-wide pandemic of influenza breaks out, and within the space of a year kills 30 million people

1918 July 18 The Allies hold the Germans on the Marne and begin a successful counterattack with tanks

1918 July 17 Tsar Nicholas II and his wife and children are murdered by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg

1918 July 8 Hermann Goering, a fighter ace who has shot down 22 Allied aircraft by the end of the war, becomes commander of the Richthofen Squadron

1918 Civil war enables the Bolsheviks to impose a rigid system of state control on the Russian economy, through War Communism and Food Brigades

1918 Russia's peasants, victims of White and Red Terror, suffer atrocities from both sides in the civil war

1918 from June - Faisal and T.E. Lawrence pin down a Turkish army in a campaign of guerrilla warfare

1918 May US troops are by now fighting in large numbers on the western front

1918 May Women are enlisted in Britain's air force, in the newly formed WRAF (Women'sRoyal Air Force)

1918 April 21 The German air ace Baron von Richthofen is finally shot down, after himself destroying 80 Allied planes

1918 March 13 Trotsky, given the task of creating an army for the Bolsheviks, conscripts peasants from the villages

1918 March 10 Lenin moves the capital of Russia from Petrograd back to Moscow

1918 March 3 At Brest-Litovsk Lenin signs a peace treaty with Germany and Austria, ceding vast territories and valuable resources

1918 March The Bolsheviks, now in power, change their name to the more resounding Russian Communist Party

1918 March Lavr Kornilov leads the heroic Ice March which boosts the morale of the White Russians

1918 January I9 Lenin dissolves the elected assembly in Petrograd to establish a one- party Soviet state

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1918 January 8 President Woodrow Wilson formulates fourteen detailed proposals as a basis for world peace once the conflict has ended

1918 January Supporters of the old regime within the Russian army prepare to use force against the new Bolshevik regime

1918 Lloyd George, fighting the British general election as head of a coalition, devastates the Liberal opposition

1918 Countess Markiewicz, an Irish republican, is elected a member of Britain's House of Commons but refuses to take her seat

1918 In My Antonia Willa Cather's heroine survives setbacks on the Nebraska frontier

1918 Wilfred Owen, having returned to the front, is killed by machine-gun fire a week before the end of the war

1918 Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld produces his 'Red and Blue Chair', under the influence of the De Stijl movement

1918 Eric Gill completes his Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral

1918 Marie Stopes, a committed advocate of birth control, publishes Married Love, a frank discussion of sexual relations

1918 The Russian artist Kasimir Malevich begins a series of White on White paintings

1918 Rebecca West publishes her first novel, The Return of the Soldier

1918 In Alexander Blok's poem The Twelve, Christ leads his apostles in support of Russia's revolution

1918 Lytton Strachey fails to show conventional respect to four famous Victorians in his influential volume of short biographes entitled Eminent Victorians

1918 Wafd, a national party, is formed in Cairo with the purpose of ending Egypt's enforced link with Britain

1918 British women are at last given the right to vote, but only if aged 30 or over

1918 The British viceroy in Dublin imprisons 73 Sinn Fein leaders, including Eamon de Valera, on allegations of a German plot

1918 Béla Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle is finally staged in Budapest, nine years after its composition

1917 December 9 The British commander Edmund Allenby captures Jerusalem from its

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Turkish defenders

1917 December Wartime scarcity causes sugar rationing to be imposed in Britain, to be followed soon by meat and butter and related products

1917 December The Cheka (origin of the KGB) is established to suppress political dissent in Russia

1917 November 20 Suitable ground is selected by the British at the battle of Cambrai for the first serious deployment of their new tanks

1917 November 8-12 The Bolsheviks attempt to stifle opposition in the run-up to the election for Russia's new Constituent Assembly

1917 November 8 Lenin's Decree on Land abolishes private ownership of large estates and promises the land to the peasants

1917 November 8 Lenin issues a Decree of Peace, inviting Russia's enemies to enter into immediate peace negotiations

1917 November 7 Bolsheviks storm the Winter Palace in Petrograd and arrest the ministers of the Provisional Government

1917 November 7 Edmund Allenby takes the Palestinian town of Gaza, at the third British attempt

1917 November 6 British and Canadian infantry, slithering through a morass of mud, capture the village of Passchendaele

1917 November 5 The Peter and Paul fortress is taken, giving the Bolsheviks control of Petrograd

1917 November 3 The soldiers of the Petrograd garrison mutiny on being ordered to the front

1917 November Women are enlisted into Britain's army (Women's Auxiliary Corps) and navy (Women's Royal Naval Service)

1917 October 24 - a victory at Caporetto enables the Austrian army to penetrate far into northeast Italy

1917 October 15 The dancer Mata Hari is executed in France as a German spy

1917 October 23 Lenin persuades the Bolshevik central committee to vote for an armed insurrection

1917 October Lenin, in disguise, returns from Finland to Petrograd, where he hides in the flat of a party worker

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1917 September Trotsky, released from prison, stages a coup to win Bolshevik control of the Petrograd Soviet

1917 September Russian opinion polarizes, with support growing for left-wing Bolsheviks and right-wing Kadets

1917 August Kerensky dismisses Kornilov as commander-in-chief, antagonizing the right wing in Russia

1917 July 31 Haig sends British troops over the top in the third battle of Ypres

1917 July 21 Prince Lvov steps down as head of the Provisional Government in Russia and is replaced by Alexander Kerensky

1917 July Trotsky is imprisoned and Lenin flees to Finland as Russia's Provisional Government cracks down on the Bolsheviks

1917 July 17 An armed uprising in Petrograd disperses after Lenin declines to give support

1917 July 6 T.E. Lawrence and an Arab force surprise the Turkish garrison at Aqaba and win anoverwhelming victory

1917 June A Russian summer offensive against the Germans results in massive loss of life and territory

1917 June The Allies frustrate the German U-boats by introducing the convoy system

1917 April 12 Canadian troops take Vimy Ridge, subsequently the site of Canada's most important war memorial

1917 April German U-boats sink 430 Allied and neutral merchant ships in this month alone

1917 April Trotsky hurries back to Russia from exile in the United States

1917 April 6 Woodrow Wilson, president of the USA, declares war on Germany

1917 April Lenin expounds in Petrograd the new theory of his April Theses, predicting the possibility of imminent revolution

1917 April The German authorities allow Lenin to travel home from Switzerland through Germany, hoping for Communist disruption of the Russian war effort

1917 March 15 Prince Georgi Lvov becomes prime minister in Russia's new Provisional Government

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1917 March 1 The Petrograd Soviet demands drastic reforms in return for supporting the proposed Provisional Government in Russia

1917 March 15 With his capital city in the hands of rebels, tsar Nicholas II abdicates

1917 March 12 An uprising in Petrograd brings the Peter and Paul fortress into the hands of the rebels

1917 March 11 Crowds demonstrating in Petrograd are fired on after tsar Nicholas II sanctions the use of force

1917 March 11 The British commander Stanley Maude captures Baghdad from the Turks

1917 March 10 A mutiny by soldiers, in support of Petrograd demonstrators, proves a t urning point in Russia's February revolution

1917 March 1 A deciphered telegram, from the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann, inflames US public opinion by promising Texas and more to Mexico

1917 March German troops on the western front begin withdrawal to the recently constructed defences of the Hindenburg Line

1917 Anti-German feeling causes the British royal family to adopt the name Windsor instead of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha

1917 The US Congress passes the Eighteenth Amendment, legislating for the introduction of Prohibition

1917 A massive explosion devastates Halifax, in Canada, after a collision involving a French munitions ship

1917 Paul Valéry wins praise for his long symbolic poem La Jeune Parque

1917 Otto Klemperer starts a seven-year spell as music director of Cologne opera, and begins to acquire an international reputation

1917 Chequers, in the Chilterns, is privately donated to the nation to become the British prime minister's country residence

1917 Foreign Secretary A.J. Balfour declares Britain's conditional support for a homeland in Palestine for the Jews

1917 Race riots against migrant southern blacks in East St Louis, Missouri, leave forty- eight dead

1917 July The Hogarth Press publishes its first book, Two Stories, containing a new short story by Leonard Woolf and another by Virginia Woolf

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1917 Australia Felix is the first in Henry Handel Richardson's trilogy of novels about her father

1917 The first annual prizes are awarded, under the terms of Joseph Pulitzer's will, for the best new US novel, play, history and biography

1917 Comedian Buster Keaton makes his first appearance in a film, The Butcher Boy

1917 Manuel de Falla's ballet The Three-Cornered Hat is produced by Diaghilev with choreography by Massine and designs by Picasso

1917 Eamon de Valera, newly released from prison, is elected to lead Sinn Fein

1917 Piet Mondrian and other Dutch artists establish the movement known as De Stijl, together with a magazine of the same name

1917 Parade brings together Massine (choreography), Satie (music), Cocteau (libretto) and Picasso (sets and costumes)

1917 Amedeo Modigliani's first Paris exhibition is immediately closed by the police because it contains paintings of nudes

1917 Wounded at the front on the Somme, the poet Wilfred Owen is invalided home to Britain

1917 Silent film comedian Harold Lloyd adopts the glasses and the straw hat that become his familiar props

1917 March Leonard and Virginia Woolf buy a small hand-press and some old typeface, launching their adventure as printers and publishers of the Hogarth Press

1917 John Ireland's Second Violin Concerto meets with immediate approval

1917 Jeeves and Bertie Wooster make their first appearance in P.G. Wodehouse's The Man with Two Left Feet

1917 Returning to the front after being wounded in the leg, Hitler is promoted to the rank of lance-corporal

1917 The Jones Act gives Puerto Ricans US citizenship and a popularly elected Senate and House of Representatives

1917 New York responds with enthusiasm when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band performs a new kind of music in Reisenweber's restaurant

1917 The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire is the first to use the term Surrealism

1917 Marcel Duchamp submits a ceramic urinal to the Society of Independent Artists in

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New York, giving it the title Fountain

1916 December 16 Philippe Pétain becomes a French national hero for his successful defence of Verdun

1916 December 6 Herbert Asquith resigns in the face of a political coup against him, and is replaced as UK prime minister by Lloyd George

1916 December 6 Bucharest, the capital of Romania, is captured by Austrian and Bulgarian forces

1916 November 21 The emperor Francis Joseph dies after 66 years on the thrones of Austria and Hungary, to be succeeded by his great-nephew Charles I

1916 November 7 Woodrow Wilson wins re-election as US president after campaigning on the slogan 'He kept us out of war'

1916 September 17 Baron von Richthofen, the 'Red Baron', shoots down the first of many Allied aircraft

1916 September 15 Eleven British tanks go into pioneering but ineffective action at the battle of the Somme

1916 August 27 Romania, hoping for territorial gains from Hungary, joins the war on the side of the Allies

1916 August 20 A brief success in the front line against Austria prompts Italy to declare war on Germany

1916 June 27 Greece joins the Allies by declaring war on Bulgaria

1916 June 24 An Allied advance in the valley of the Somme launches a four-month battle with very heavy casualties

1916 June 17 Belgian troops from the Congo occupy the German colony of Ruanda- Urundi

1916 June 5 Sharif Hussein, the emir of Mecca, proclaims himself the leader of the Muslim world, thus launching an Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire

1916 June 4 Aleksei Brusilov leads a surprise Russian offensive against Germany and Austria-Hungary

1916 May 31 The German and British fleets clash off Jutland, in a hard-fought but inconclusive encounter

1916 April 29 The British garrison at Kut, on the Tigris, surrenders to the Turks after a five-month siege

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1916 March 24 A German U-boat sinks the Channel steamer Sussex, with the loss of many civilian lives

1916 March 2 Conscription is introduced in Britain for men aged between 18 and 40

1916 Feb 26 - A French troopship La Provence is torpedoed by a U-boat off Cape Matapan and sinks with the loss of nearly 1000 lives

1916 February 21 A German thrust against the French begins the year-long battle of Verdun

1916 British and French forces win full control of the German colonies of Togoland and Cameroon

1916 Captain Peter Nissen, a Canadian mining engineer, designs the Nissen Hut for the Allied armies

1916 Lloyd George splits his own Liberal party when he forms a coalition government with the Conservatives

1916 Dogs are trained in Germany, by Dr Gerhard Stalling, to guide soldiers blinded in the war

1916 The author H.H. Munro ('Saki') is killed by a sniper's bullet on a battlefield in France

1916 The Federal-Aid Highway Act sets up the first national road system in the US

1916 After an 800-mile journey in an open boat Ernest Shackleton returns to rescue his stranded colleagues in the South Shetlands

1916 Manchester dramatist Harold Brighouse has a major success when his play Hobson's Choice is performed in London

1916 Margaret Sanger opens the first US birth control clinic, in a poor district of Brooklyn, and is gaoled for thirty days

1916 Claude Monet begins the great cyclorama of water-lilies, Nympheas, that he donates to the French nation

1916 The Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) publishes her first collection, Sea Garden

1916 Hiding for a day in a shell hole in no man's land, Harold Macmillan reads 'intermittently' the book in his pocket – Aeschylus's Prometheus in Greek

1916 At the battle of the Somme, Harold Macmillan is seriously wounded in the pelvis and thigh

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1916 Hitler is wounded in the leg at the Battle of the Somme

1916 The musical Chu Chin Chow opens at His Majesty's Theatre in London and runs for a record 2235 performances

1916 Robert Graves publishes his first book of poems, Over the Brazier

1916 In his ground-breaking film Intolerance D.W. Griffith intercuts four parallel stories from different historical periods

1916 Gustav Holst completes his orchestral suite c, not performed in its entirety until 1920

1916 After returning to his battalion in April, Harold Macmillan is lightly wounded during a reconaissance patrol

1916 Tristan Tzara and other artists in Zurich call their new movement Dada (the French for 'hobby-horse', selected at random from a dictionary)

1916 Maxim Gorky publishes My Apprenticeship, the second volume of his autobiography

1916 Hubert Parry sets profoundly evocative verses by William Blake and gives his composition the title Jerusalem

1916 Ottorino Respighi completes his symphonic poem for orchestra Fountains of Rome, first performed in Rome the following year

1916 The Passing Show of 1916 is the first of 22 musicals written in the short span of 17 years by the brothers George and Ira Gershwin

1916 Three members of the Russian imperial family assassinate the influential charlatan Grigory Rasputin

1916 William Boeing flies an aircraft built by himself, and a month later sets up in Seattle his own Aero Product company

1916 In his Course in General Linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure provides the basis for the broader development of structuralism

1916 "If You Were the Only Girl in the World" features in the London musical The Bing Boys are Here

1916 Manuel de Falla completes his piece for piano and orchestra, Nights in the Gardens of Spain

1916 The US National Defense Act establishes the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC)

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1916 Woodrow Wilson sends the marines to maintain order when the Dominican Republic slips towards civil war

1916 Patrick Pearse and his fellow Irish rebel James Connolly are executed by firing squad

1916 The success of Jenufa in Prague finally brings international recognition to Leos Janacek, already in his sixties

1916 The is completed, the last house designed by Le Corbusier in La Chaux-de-Fonds and one of the first in the world to use reinforced concrete

1916 In his first World Series for the Boston Red Sox, 21-year-old Babe Ruth sets a still unbroken record, pitching 13 successive scoreless innings

1916 The Provincetown Players are founded in Massachusetts, opening with a production of Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff

1916 Britain and France sign the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, dividing up spheres of influence in the Middle East

1916 The National Parks Service is set up within the US Department of the Interior

1916 Eamon de Valera comes to prominence as one of the republican leaders in the Easter Rising

1916 Roger Casement is arrested after returning secretly to Ireland three days before the Easter Rising

1916 The rebel leader Patrick Pearse stands under the portico of Dublin's General Post Office to announce the birth of the Irish republic

1916 The occupation of the General Post Office in Dublin marks the beginning of the Easter Rising

1916 'Earth's the right place for love' in Robert Frost's 'Birches', included in his collection Mountain Interval

1916 The election of Hipolito Irigoyen as president begins sixteen years of radical government in Argentina

1916 Enrique Granados, on the last leg of his return from New York, is one of many civilians to die when the Sussex is torpedoed by a U-boat in the English Channel

1916 Haiti becomes a US protectorate, under the terms of a treaty signed in the previous year

1916 Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbook, buys a controlling share in the British

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newspaper the Daily Express

1916 Ras Tafari, a member of the Ethiopian imperial family, deposes his distant relation the emperor and puts on the throne his aunt, Zauditu

1916 Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg found the radical Spartacus League, named after the gladiator

1916 The opera Goyescas, by Spanish composer Enrique Granados, has its premiere in New York

1916 New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies sets up a plastic surgery unit at Aldershot, a British military base

1916 Wartime income tax soars in Britain to an unprecedented 30%

1915 from December - the 225-horsepower Eagle, the first of many Rolls-Royce aero- engines, is used to power British bombers

1915 December Allied troops begin a withdrawal from the Dardanelles after the abject failure of the Gallipoli campaign

1915 December German armies make sufficient advances to drive the Russians out of Poland

1915 November 22 A British and Indian force is defeated by the Turks at Ctesiphon, on the bank of the Tigris

1915 October The Serbian army flees, abandoning Serbia to Austrian and Bulgarian invaders

1915 October 14 Bulgaria, hoping to gain territory in disputed Macedonia, declares war on Serbia

1915 October 12 The English nurse Edith Cavell is court-martialled and executed by German forces in Belgium

1915 October 9 Austria-Hungary renews its attack on Serbia, and its troops capture Belgrade

1915 October 5 French and British troops land at Salonika and push north to relieve Serbia

1915 September 25 The British use chlorine gas for the first time in an attack on Loos, but in places it is blown back over the British lines when the wind changes

1915 September 18 The emperor Nicholas II moves to military HQ to take personal command of the Russian armies

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1915 from July - the Russians advance through Turkish Armenia and push west into Anatolia as far as Trabzon

1915 July 30 The Germans make their first effective use of a new weapon, the flame thrower, in an attack on the British in the second batte of Ypres

1915 July German fighter planes are armed with new machine guns synchronized to fire between the revolving propeller blades

1915 July South African troops capture German South West Africa

1915 June Dutch aircraft designer Anton , working for the Germans, vastly improves the Roland Garros technique for firing machine guns through the propellers of fighter planes

1915 May from May - hundreds of thousands of Armenians die as the Turks forcibly remove them from their homelands

1915 May 31 A German Zeppelin airship makes the first bombing raid on London

1915 May 23 Italy declares war against Austria-Hungary, but not as yet against Germany

1915 May 7 The British passenger liner Lusitania is sunk by a U-boat, with the loss of 1000 civilian lives

1915 May Italy revokes the Triple Alliance of 1882 that aligned her with Germany and Austria-Hungary

1915 April 25 British and French troops, together with the Australian and New Zealander Army Corps (ANZAC), land in Gallipoli

1915 April 22-3 The Germans gain ground at Ypres after the first significant use of chlorine gas

1915 April 22 The Germans attempt an advance on the western front, launching the second battle of Ypres

1915 April 1 The French aviator Roland Garros fires a machine gun through the propeller in his fighter plane, using metal plates to deflect any bullets that hit the propeller

1915 April In a secret pact, signed in London, Italy is promised territorial gains if she joins the Allied side

1915 March 21 Two German Zeppelin airships bomb Paris, causing 23 deaths

1915 March 18 British and French battleships are sunk by mines in the Dardanelles, with

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the loss of 620 French sailors on one of them

1915 March A typhus epidemic sweeps through Serbia, severely weakening the nation's armed forces

1915 Winston Churchill is a firm supporter of a new invention, the tank, encouraging its initial development while still at the Admiralty

1915 February - British and French forces invade and capture the German colony of Cameroon

1915 January 30 Two passenger liners are sunk by German U-boats

1915 January 24 The German battle cruiser Blücher is sunk by the British off the Dogger Bank 1915 January 19 A Zeppelin airship makes a night-time bombing raid on the English port of Great Yarmouth

1915 January Germans make an experimental but ineffective use of chlorine gas against the Russians in Poland

1915 January Winston Churchill is heavily involved in a bold plan to secure Allied access through the Dardanelles to the Black Sea

1915 Petrograd buzzes with rumours about Rasputin's dissolute life, including salacious hints that he is the lover of the empress Alexandra

1915 Einstein submits a paper, The field equations of gravitation, containing the sums required to explain the general theory of relativity

1915 William Joseph Simmons, a suspended Methodist preacher in Georgia, wins a big racist following in the south with his revival of the defunct Ku Klux Klan

1915 Secret agent Richard Hannay makes his first appearance in John Buchan's Thirty- Nine Steps

1915 Edgar Lee Masters makes his name as a poet with the publication of Spoon River Anthology

1915 The Russian poet and dramatist Vladimir Mayakovsky publishes his first major long poem, A Cloud in Trousers

1915 Harold Macmillan sees action for the first time in the battle of Loos and is wounded

1915 D.H. Lawrence's novel about the Brangwen family, The Rainbow, is seized by the police as an obscene work

1915 Charles-Édouard Jeanneret develops Maison Domino, a system of low-cost housing

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with reinforced concrete columns and precast floors

1915 The inflationary pressures of world war force nations to abandon the established gold standard

1915 The English writer Virginia Woolf publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out

1915 The Irish painter Jack Yeats develops a romantic Expressionist style, with a new interest in Celtic myth

1915 Typhoid-carrier Mary Mallon is detained in New York after leaving a trail of destruction

1915 The nearest star to earth, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri 4.22 light years away, is discovered by Robert Innes, Scottish director of the Johannesburg Observatory

1915 Charlie Chaplin makes The Tramp, giving prominence to the famous character he launched the previous year in Kid Auto Races at Venice

1915 Kasimir Malevich exhibits his painting Black Square in Petrograd, in the final Futurist exhibition

1915 Woodrow Wilson sends US marines to take control in Haiti after a spate of political assassinations

1915 Franz Kafka publishes Metamorphosis, the tale of a travelling salesman who wakes up to find himself transformed into an insect

1915 US novelist Ernest Poole publishes The Harbor, set on the Brooklyn waterfront

1915 American campaigner for birth control Margaret Sanger publishes a controversial pamphlet, Family Limitation

1915 After years of slow decline, the Star and Garter is bought by the Auctioneers and Estate Agents Institute and presented to Queen Mary to become a hospital for disabled servicemen

1915 Australian author C.J. Dennis creates the Sentimental Bloke, featuring first in a book of poems and four years later in a film

1915 Thomas Edison invents a machine to record telephone conversations, calling it the telescribe

1915 Radiotelephone messages are transmitted from Arlington in Virginia to the Eiffel Tower in Paris

1915 Canadian army surgeon John McCrae writes 'In Flanders Fields' after a friend is

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killed in the trenches

1915 Somerset Maugham publishes his semi-autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage

1915 Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag, by George Asaf and Felix Powell, rapidly becomes one of the most popular songs of the day

1915 D.W. Griffith's epic film The Birth of a Nation has its premiere in New York

1915 The Corning Glass Company launches Pyrex, a new range of heat-resistant kitchen ware made from borosilicate glass

1915 March Leonard and Virginia Woolf move to Hogarth House, in Paradise Road, which remains their home for ten years

1915 The Metropolitan Water Board Light Railway, with a two foot guage, is constructed to connect the coal wharf and pumping stations in Hampton Waterworks and the Kempton Park pumping station

1915 Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson loses his title, in the 26th round, to the "Great White Hope", Jess Willard

1915 Manuel de Falla's ballet El Amor Brujo, including the 'Ritual Fire Dance', is performed in Paris

1915 Alexander Graham Bell again summons his assistant Thomas Watson (as in 1876), but this time he is in New York and Watson in San Francisco

1915 Mahatma Gandhi returns to India after more than twenty years in South Africa

1915 An employee of the Metropolitan Railway coins the term Metro-land when promoting the company's services in London's suburbs

1914 December 7 Maximilian von Spee's squadron of cruisers is sunk by the British off the Falkland Islands

1914 December Roger Casement travels to Germany to persuade Irish prisoners of war to change sides and invade Ireland

1914 December German planes cross the Channel and bomb Dover

1914 from November - with the battle lines stablized to the coast, the German and Allied armies settle in for years of gruesome trench warfare

1914 November 23 A British force seizes the Turkish port of Basra, to safeguard the supply of Persian oil

1914 November 16 The German enclave of Qingdao, in China, falls to the Japanese

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after a two-month siege

1914 November 9 The German cruiser Emden is sunk off the Cocos-Keeling islands by an Australian cruiser, the Sydney

1914 November 5 Britain and France declare war on the Ottoman empire

1914 November 2 Russia declares war on the Ottoman empire

1914 November 1 Maximilian von Spee sinks two British cruisers off Coronel, on the Pacific coast of south America

1914 H.G. Wells publishes The War that will end War, offering an optimistic prediction of the present conflict leading to a future world state

1914 More than 30,000 troops in the Canadian Expeditionary Force sail to fight with Britain

1914 British troops are driven to the western front in London Transport double-deckers

1914 from October - there are heavy casualties on both sides, and a small advantage to the Allies, in the fighting round Ypres during the 'race to the sea'

1914 October 29 Turkey, launching an attack on Russian ports in the Black Sea, enters the war on the German side

1914 October British planes, taking off from Dunkirk, bomb Cologne railway station and destroy Germany's latest Zeppelin in its great shed at Düsseldorf

1914 from September - the German and French armies, attempting to outflank each other, engage in a race to the sea

1914 September 13 The Germans adopt a defensive position at the river Aisne in northern France, in the first sign of the trench warfare that will characterize the entire war in the west

1914 September 8 After a four-day battle, the French drive the German forces back over the river Marne

1914 September 5 A French army halts the German advance, just 30 miles from Paris

1914 September 3 A Germany army crosses the river Marne in an advance towards Paris

1914 from August - the German cruiser Emden carries out successful raids on British shipping in the seas around India

1914 from August - Serbian forces repel two Austrian invasions of their territory

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1914 August British and French forces invade the German colony of Togoland

1914 August 25-28 A German army encircles and almost annihilates a larger Russian force at Tannenberg

1914 August 23 The British Expeditionary Force fights a rearguard action to escape encirclement by the Germans at Mons

1914 August 23 Japan, with her own local agenda in the far east, declares war on Germany

1914 August 20 A Germany army reaches and enters the Belgian capital, Brussels

1914 August 12 Britain declares war on the empire of Austria-Hungary

1914 August 10 France declares war on the empire of Austria-Hungary

1914 August 7 A small British Expeditionary Force is rushed across the Channel to Boulogne

1914 August 7 Spain declares a policy of neutrality in the rapidly developing European war

1914 The new republican government of Portugal offers Britain support in the war

1914 August 4 President Woodrow Wilson proclaims US neutrality in the European war

1914 With five major European nations committed within a few days to hostilities, World War I begins

1914 August 4 Bound by treaty to defend Belgium, Britain declares war on Germany

1914 August 4 German troops invade Belgium, violating her guaranteed neutrality

1914 August 3 Italy declares neutrality amid the rush of other major European powers into war

1914 August 3 With her troops already poised to attack, Germany declares war on France

1914 August 2 German troops move into Luxembourg and demand passage through neutral Belgium

1914 August 2 Germany and the Ottoman empire sign a secret treaty of alliance

1914 August 1 In response to the tsar's mobilization of his troops, Germany declares

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war on Russia

1914 July 30 The Austrian attack on Serbia causes Russia to mobilize her army

1914 July 28 Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, following this with bombardment of the Serbian capital, Belgrade

1914 July Erskine Childers sails his own yacht from Germany to Ireland with 900 rifles and 14,000 rounds of ammunition for the Irish Volunteers

1914 Germany promises to support Austria-Hungary if a strike against Serbia provokes war with Russia

1914 Austria-Hungary plans to attack Serbia, in response to the assassination of the archduke, and seeks a guarantee of German support

1914 June 28 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, is assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip

1914 The British government changes the status of Egypt from a Turkish province to a British protectorate

1914 Charlie Chaplin introduces his most famous character, the little tramp, in Kid Auto Races at Venice

1914 Ivor Novello has a great success with his topical song Keep the Home Fires Burning (with lyrics by Lena Ford)

1914 In action as a front-line HQ runner Hitler is awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, for bravery

1914 Robert Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is published posthumously in an abbreviated version

1914 Benito Mussolini founds a newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia' ('The People of Italy'), to argue the case for Italy joining the war

1914 Stanley Spencer joins the Royal Army Medical Corps, with whom he finds a wealth of subject matter

1914 Harold Macmillan joins the King's Royal Rifle Corps, transferring a few months later to the Grenadier Guards

1914 October Leonard and Virginia Woolf move to Richmond, taking rooms at 17 The Green (now also called Richmond House)

1914 Benito Mussolini, advocating Italian entry into the war on the side of the Allies, is

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expelled from the Socialist party

1914 Tsar Nicholas II changes the name of his capital city to Petrograd, because St Petersburg sounds German

1914 The Panama Canal opens to shipping on a neutral basis just two weeks after the start of World War I

1914 On the outbreak of war, Hitler applies to join the German army and is enlisted in the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment

1914 The Clayton Act strengthens many aspects of US antitrust legislation

1914 Jacob Epstein completes his sculpture The Rock Drill, the outstanding work of the Vorticist movement

1914 The Swedish-American poet Carl Sandburg makes his name with 'Chicago', published in the magazine Poetry

1914 The sculptor Constantin Brancusi has his first one-man exhibition, at Stieglitz's gallery in New York

1914 A Home Rule Act is finally passed for Ireland, with its implementation postponed until after the war

1914 The American writer Amy Lowell publishes an Imagist collection of poems, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed

1914 Giacomo della Chiesa is elected pope and takes the name Benedict XV

1914 Martha, 29 years old and the last passenger pigeon in the world, dies in the Cincinnati zoo in Ohio

1914 The Russian painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin develops an abstract style to which he gives the name Constructivism

1914 Vaughan Williams' London Symphony, including picturesque sounds of the city's street life, is first performed

1914 The Assemblies of God is established as the largest affiliation of Pentecostal churches

1914 The Times Literary Supplement is published in London as an independent paper, separate from The Times

1914 Margaret Anderson publishes in Chicago the first issue of The Little Review, a monthly literary magazine

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1914 Marcel Duchamp exhibits his first pure 'readymade', a bottle rack bought in a department store and displayed without alteration

1914 The poem 'Mending Wall' features in Robert Frost's collection North of Boston

1914 American-born poet Thomas Stearns Eliot crosses the Atlantic to England, making it his home for the rest of his life

1914 British golfer Harry Vardon wins his sixth Open, a record still unbroken

1914 After years of delay James Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of short stories, is published

1914 More than 1000 die when the liner Empress of Ireland sinks after a collision in the St Lawrence river

1914 The first issue of the weekly journal The New Republic is published in the USA

1914 Antoni Gaudí completes the fanciful Park Güell, a residential project north of Barcelona based on the English concept of the garden city

1914 Calouste Gulbenkian earns his nickname – Mr Five Percent – from the share he receives for negotiating oil deals in the Ottoman empire

1914 James Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins serial publication in a London journal, The Egoist

1914 The tenor Beniamino Gigli wins an international singing competition in Parma, and makes his operatic debut later in the same year

1914 Vaughan Williams writes a romance for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending, inspired by George Meredith's poem of the same name

1914 Royal-Dutch Shell begins to pump oil in Venezuela, launching the country as a major oil producer

1914 Tarzan makes his first appearance in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel Tarzan of the Apes

1914 Wyndham Lewis and others launch Vorticism with a new magazine, Blast

1914 British officers stationed at the Curragh in Dublin say they would resign if ordered to quell Protestant resistance in Ulster

1914 A building by Walter Gropius for the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Cologne brings him international attention

1914 A suffragette slashes the Rokeby Venus by Velázquez in London's National

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Gallery

1914 The Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral makes her name with her first collection, Sonetos de la muerte

1914 British rule is consolidated in Nigeria by the merging of north and south as a single colony

1914 George Ruth acquires the nickname Babe when he joins the baseball team the Baltimore Orioles

1914 Summoned to Austria for military service, Hitler is rejected as being physically unfit

1914 J.B.M. Hertzog founds the National Party in South Africa to represent Afrikaner interests

1913 Construction begins on the government buildings in New Delhi, designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker

1913 D.H. Lawrence publishes a semi-autobiographical novel about the Morel family, Sons and Lovers

1913 The Rugby Football Union acquires an additional 1.6 acres of land for Twickenham Rugby ground

1913 The New York World publishes the first crossword puzzle, devised by English-born journalist Arthur Wynne

1913 An underground railway opens in Buenos Aires, the first subway in Latin America

1913 The march Colonel Bogey is written and published by a Royal Marine bandleader under the pseudonym Kenneth Alford

1913 A young American architect, Walter B. Griffin, wins the competition to design Canberra

1913 Leonardo's Mona Lisa is recovered two years after its theft when the thief, Vincenzo Perugia, tries to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence

1913 Yuan Shikai outlaws the Guomindang party in the republic of China, to give himself unchallenged power as president

1913 Marcel Proust publishes at his own expense Swann's Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past

1913 The Irish National Volunteers are formed in Dublin, in response to the Protestant equivalent in Ulster

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1913 Edith Wharton's novel The Custom of the Country begins publication in serial form

1913 A coup led by Enver Pasha brings the Young Turks to power in Istanbul

1913 English physicist Henry Moseley proposes that the atomic number of an element is a physical reality, thus laying the basis for the modern periodic table

1913 The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam publishes his first collection, Stone

1913 John Ireland sets Masefield's poem Sea Fever to music

1913 Frederick Delius completes On Hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring, first performed this same year in Leipzig

1913 The foxtrot, possibly introduced by US performer Harry Fox, becomes an immensely popular ballroom dance

1913 marries a Hungarian ballerina and is dismissed from the Ballets Russes by a jealous Diaghilev

1913 Alain-Fournier completes his semi-autobiographical novel Le Grand Meaulnes

1913 The Brillo Manufacturing Company markets the first Brillo pads in the USA

1913 The Treaty of Bucharest assigns to Greece nearly all the Greek-speaking regions in the Balkans and Mediterranean

1913 The Balkan states and the Ottoman empire agree an armistice in Bucharest, ending the Second Balkan War

1913 German author Thomas Mann publishes the novella Death in Venice

1913 The so-called Cat and Mouse Act is the British government's response to hunger strikes by suffragettes

1913 Albert Schweitzer and his wife become missionaries at Lambaréné in west Africa

1913 Bulgaria launches the Second Balkan War, in the end to the great detriment of Bulgarian interests

1913 A suffragette, Emily Davison, dies after throwing herself under the king's horse in the Derby at Epsom

1913 Henry Ford pioneers the moving assembly line in the manufacture of cars at his company's Michigan plant

1913 Maxim Gorky publishes Childhood, the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy

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1913 18-year-old Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad makes her debut in Oslo

1913 Frederick Soddy uses the term 'isotope' (Greek for 'same place') to describe observed anomalies in the periodic table

1913 Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell complete a work of mathematical logic, Principia Mathematica

1913 The Danish physicist Niels Bohr uses quantum theory as a key to understanding the structure of the atom

1913 French physicists Charles Fabry and Henri Buisson discover the ozone layer in the stratosphere

1913 The cubist movement enters its second phase, deriving from the use of collage and known as Synthetic

1913 The Treaty of London, ending the First Balkan War, allows Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia to divide up much of European Turkey

1913 US poet Robert Frost publishes his first book of poems, A Boy's Will

1913 Italian Futurist sculptor Umberto Boccioni suggests human movement in his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

1913 Igor Stravinsky and Vaslav Nijinsky provoke uproar in Paris with for Ballets Russes

1913 Marcel Duchamp creates Bicycle Wheel, his first 'assisted readymade', consisting of the wheel screwed upside down on a painted wooden stool

1913 Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion has its first performance – in a German version in Vienna

1913 Hitler moves to Munich to begin a new life, and in an attempt to avoid Austrian military service

1913 Compton Mackenzie publishes the first volume of his autobiographial novel

1913 The Canadian Arctic Expedition, led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, sets off to the north

1913 The Morris company launches the Morris Oxford, later known as the Bullnose Morris from the shape of its radiator

1913 Lawrence Bragg and his father, William, together develop X-ray crystallography, based on the diffraction patterns of crystals

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1913 The Woolworth Building opens in New York as the world's tallest skyscraper, a distinction it retains until 1930

1913 The Spanish government grants a degree of administrative autonomy to four provinces of Catalonia

1913 English geologist Arthur Holmes publishes The Age of the Earth, offering evidence that the planet is at least 1.6 billion years old

1913 The first issue of the New Statesman is published by Beatrice and Sidney Webb

1913 Albert Einstein formulates the law of photochemical equivalence, a fundamental principle of chemical reactions induced by light

1913 Dinizulu's son Solomon follows his father as king or chief of the Zulu people, and direct descendants of Shaka's brother Mwande continue to inherit until today

1913 In Pollyanna Eleanor Porter introduces an immensely successful character, the irrepressibly optimistic orphan Pollyanna Whittier

1913 The US navy begins transmitting by radio a regular time signal, much used by the nation's watchmakers and menders.

1913 The Vickers Fighting Biplane No 1 is unveiled in London at the Olympia Aero Show as the world's first purpose-built fighter plane

1913 Walter Sickert paints Ennui, depicting a difficult or dreary moment in a marriage

1913 In O Pioneers Willa Cather finds her major theme, life on the frontier

1913 The Armory Show (officially the International Exhibition of Modern Art) is a sensation in New York

1913 Cecil B. de Mille, Jesse Lasky and Sam Goldwyn join forces to form a film production company

1913 A new and spectacular Grand Central Station opens in New York, designed by Charles Reed and Alan Stern

1913 Unionists in Ulster aim to raise a Volunteer Force of 100,000 men, and begin drilling with dummy wooden rifles

1912 A footbridge, designed by François Hennibique, is built just south of Kew Gardens station with narrow deck and high walls to protect users' clothing from the smoke of trains.

1912-1914 Kingston Bridge is widened and the carriageway increased from 25 to 55 feet with a new facade of Portland Stone to replicate features of the original

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1912 Under pressure from Russia, the London conference allots the ethnically Albanian region of Kosovo to Serbia

1912 A conference of great powers in London accepts Albanian independence but within altered boundaries

1912 Giacomo Balla attempts to paint movement in his futurist Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

1912 An armistice agreed between the Ottoman empire and three of the Balkan states ends the war in the Balkans

1912 Democrat Woodrow Wilson defeats Republicans Taft and Roosevelt to become the 28th president of the USA

1912 Ethel Smyth, in Holloway jail, conducts her fellow prisoners in a suffragette anthem composed by herself

1912 Walter De la Mare establishes his reputation with the title poem of his collection The Listeners

1912 The opera Ariadne auf Naxos, by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, has its first premiere in Stuttgart

1912 By a prearranged plan Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia together launch the First Balkan War against Turkey

1912 An Albanian uprising against the Ottoman empire is so successful that the Albanians are able to capture Skopje in Macedonia

1912 Memphis Blues is composed by 'father of the blues' W.Handy

1912 Half a million Unionist men and women in Belfast commit themselves to civil disobedience if Home Rule government is established in Ireland

1912 Walter Gropius and other architects in Germany develop the International Modern style

1912 The South African National Native Congress (subsequently the ANC, African National Congress) is set up in Cape Province

1912 The Berlin Opera Ballet is founded to perform in the city's new opera house

1912 Arnold Schoenberg sets Pierrot Lunaire for a solo voice, reciting the text to the accompaniment of a quintet

1912 Jacob Epstein causes a stir with his provocatively modern angel on the tomb of

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Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise

1912 Renascence is the title poem in college student Edna St Vincent Millay's first published collection

1912 France and Spain agree that Spain shall become the colonial power in the north of Morocco and France in the south

1912 Carl Jung breaks with Freud and introduces the concept of the collective unconscious

1912 Harold Macmillan goes to Oxford University, after winning a place in Balliol College

1912 Ludwig Wittgenstein moves to Cambridge to study philosophy under Bertrand Russell

1912 Mack Sennett sets up the Keystone studio in California, soon to be famous for the knockabout farce of the Keystone Kops

1912 Tommy Sopwith founds the aviation company that will produce the Pup and the Camel

1912 Daphnis and Chloe, with choreography by Fokine, music by Ravel and designs by Bakst, is premiered by the Ballets Russes in Paris

1912 Theodore Roosevelt's followers form a rival party to the Republicans, soon to be known as the Bull Moose party

1912 William Howard Taft defeats Theodore Roosevelt at the Republican convention to win the nomination

1912 President Taft sends US marines into Nicaragua during a period of disorder

1912 By the treaty of Fès a French protectorate is formally established in Morocco

1912 Tibet declares its independence after the fall of the Qing dynasty and the end of imperial China

1912 Electoral reform is introduced in Argentina, with universal male suffrage and a secret ballot

1912 The first sea-going diesel-powered ship, the Selandia, is constructed and launched in Denmark

1912 The Social Democrats become the largest group in Germany's Reichstag

1912 Turkey, beset by troubles elsewhere, cedes to Italy her north African province of Libya

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1912 President Taft sends US marines to Cuba because of political unrest in the island

1912 German scientist Alfred Wegener, impressed by the neat fit between the coasts of Africa and South America, proposes the theory of continental drift

1912 Benito Mussolini, an active revolutionary Socialist, becomes editor of the party newspaper in Italy

1912 The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova publishes Evening, her first collection of poems

1912 Charles Dawson claims to have found the fossilized skull of an early man (named in his honour Eoanthropus dawsoni in a gravel pit at Piltdown

1912 Guillaume Apollinaire coins the term Orphism for Robert Delaunay's distinctive style of abstraction

1912 Vaslav Nijinsky causes a sensation dancing in the first ballet choreographed by himself, L'Après-midi d'un faune

1912 At a conference in Prague Lenin forms the Bolsheviks into a separate political party with himself as leader

1912 William Morris opens a factory at Cowley, near Oxford, to produce motor cars

1912 Rabindranath Tagore publishes a collection of his Bengali poems in Gitanjali

1912 The 'Workers' Newspaper' Pravda (meaning 'Truth') publishes its first issue in St Petersburg

1912 The White Star liner Titanic sinks on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, drowning 1513 passengers and crew

1912 Georges Braque's Fruit-Dish and Glass adds papier collé (a type of collage) to the conventions of cubism

1912 Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 creates a stir

1912 Carl Nielsen's Third Symphony, first performed in Copenhagen, brings him international renown

1912 Egon Schiele's highly explicit images of nudes land him briefly in gaol

1912 Lillian and Dorothy Gish make their screen debut with the Biograph Company

1912 A national uprising against Turkish rule in Albania launches a full-scale Balkan war

1912 UK suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst is arrested, released and rearrested twelve

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times within the year

1912 Former president Theodore Roosevelt campaigns against President Taft for the Republican nomination

1912 The Kaiser and his advisers decide to postpone a preventive war against France and Russia

1912 Arizona becomes the 48th state of the United States of America

1912 The abdication of the child emperor Puyi brings to an end the Qing dynasty

1912 Coco Chanel opens a shop selling millinery in Deauville, in France

1912 US aeroplane designer Glenn Curtis demonstrates the potential of the first successful flying boat, The Flying Fish

1912 Robert Falcon Scott and his companions reach the South Pole a month after Amundsen - and die on the return journey

1912 New Mexico becomes the 47th state of the United States of America

1912 A republic of China is proclaimed, with Sun Yatsen as its provisional president

1911 Bernard Leach discovers his skill and future craft at a raku party in Japan, where each guest is invited to throw a pot

1911 The Italian premier, Giovanni Giolitti, introduces reformist legislation including a national insurance act

1911 Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team become the first people to stand at the South Pole

1911 The painters Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and others form Der Blaue Reiter

1911 Robert Lorimer completes a chapel for the Knights of the Thistle in St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh

1911 Jelly Roll Morton plays in New York his Jelly Roll Blues

1911 and Vaslav Nijinsky leave Russia for the west

1911 The British monarch George V holds a great durbar in Delhi to celebrate his coronation as emperor of India

1911 The US composer Irving Berlin writes 'Alexander's Ragtime Band'

1911 Walter Gropius builds the Fagus Factory at Alfeld an der Leine in Germany

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1911 Rudolph Wurlitzer's company in the USA produces the first of its famous movie theatre organs

1911 An uprising in the city of Wuchang is the first major event in the rapidly developing Chinese revolution

1911 Conservative leader Robert Laird Borden becomes prime minister of Canada, ending fifteen years of Liberal rule under Wilfrid Laurier

1911 Austrian artist Gustav Klimt completes his designs for mosaics in the Palais Stoclet in Brussels

1911 French composer Henri Duparc publishes a complete edition of his songs

1911 Bruno Walter conducts in Munich the first performance of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, a few months after the composer's death

1911 Copper mining begins in Katanga, soon to be followed by the extraction of even more profitable diamonds

1911 A ship tank, 150 metres long, is opened at the National Physical Laboratory for marine testing

1911 Edward Carson tells a vast crowd in Northern Ireland that they must be ready to defend their Protestant province by force

1911 The Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin is assassinated in a Kiev theatre

1911 Alfred Adler ends his association breaks with Sigmund Freud and forms his own school of psychology

1911 Baseball pitcher Cy Young retires with a record achievement of 511 wins in 22 professional seasons

1911 Max Beerbohm publishes his novel Zuleika Dobson, in which the beauty of his heroine causes havoc among the students at Oxford

1911 's Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre in Paris

1911 Emiliano Zapata leads peasant groups in the Mexican revolution, under the slogan 'Land and Liberty'

1911 Confronted with the threat of 300 newly created peerages, the House of Lords narrowly passes Asquith's Parliament Bill (by 17 votes)

1911 Asquith's Parliament Bill proposes to end the constitutional crisis in the UK by restricting the power of the House of Lords

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1911 Hugo von Hofmannsthal adapts the English medieval morality play Everyman ('Jedermann') for performance in Salzburg

1911 Germany causes international alarm by sending a warship to Agadir, a port in French-controlled Morocco

1911 The Nestor Film Company opens the first film studio in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard

1911 Walter Sickert and other painters, sharing his preference for everyday subjects, adopt the name Camden Town Group

1911 Frances Hodgson Burnett publishes The Secret Garden, which becomes a classic of children's literature

1911 President Taft sends US marines to Honduras to protect American banana interests during a spell of political turmoil

1911 The ballet Petrushka brings together Fokine (choreography), Stravinsky (music) and Benois (sets and costumes)

1911 Italy finds a reason to invade Libya, a province of the Turkish empire.

1911 Italy finds a reason to invade Libya, a province of the Turkish empire.

1911 Scott Joplin completes a ragtime opera, Treemonisha

1911 panish composer Enrique Granados completes his Goyescas, seven pieces for piano

1911 Frank Lloyd Wright designs Taliesin, as his own home and studio, near Bear Run in Wisconsin

1911 The Titanic is launched at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast

1911 US driver Ray Harroun wins the first Indianapolis 500 motor race

1911 US inventor Isaac Newton Lewis patents a lighter version of the machine gun

1911 In a German Pension is New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield's first collection of stories

1911 John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company of New Jersey is broken up by US antitrust legislation

1911 The British chancellor, David Lloyd George, introduces the National Insurance Bill, providing workers with insurance in a few selected industries

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1911 G.K. Chesterton's clerical detective makes his first appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown

1911 Le Spectre de la Rose, with choreography by Fokine, music by Weber and designs by Bakst, is premiered by the Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo

1911 Rupert Brooke publishes Poems, the only collection to appear before his early death in World War I

1911 Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova settles in London and forms her own touring company

1911 D.H. Lawrence's career as a writer is launched with the publication of his first novel, The White Peacock

1911 Al Jolson makes his first recording, That Haunting Melody, for the Victor label

1911 Pennsylvania Station opens in New York, designed by McKim, Mead & White

1911 Nearly 150 New York garment workers die in a factory fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company

1911 Ethel Smyth's The March of Women has its premiere at a suffragette event in London's Albert Hall

1911 Richard Strauss changes musical direction with his opera Der Rosenkavalier, once again with libretto by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal

1911 Ernest Rutherford proposes the concept of the nucleus as a positively charged mass at the centre of an atom

1911 The lost Inca city of Machu Picchu is reached by US archaeologist Hiram Bingham

1911 Charles Wilson, using his cloud chamber to detect the passage of charged particles, obtains his first photographs of alpha and beta rays

1911 Eugene B. Ely lands his Curtiss biplane on the US cruiser Pennsylvania, pointing the way to the future development of the aircraft carrier

1910 The part-time English painter L.S. Lowry begins a lifetime career in a Manchester property company

1910 E.M. Forster publishes Howard's End, his novel about the Schlegel sisters and the Wilcox family

1910 Whitton Park estate is bought for housing and the house is demolished.

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1910 The Liberals win another general election called on the House of Lords issue, becoming the first British political party since 1832 to win three successive victories

1910 Giacomo Puccini's opera Girl of the Golden West premieres in New York

1910 Ferdinand Zeppelin's dirigible Deutschland provides the first commercial air service for passengers

1910 The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, wandering from home in midwinter, dies of pneumonia in the stationmaster's house at Astapovo

1910 Thomas Beecham sponsors and conducts his own season of opera at Covent Garden

1910 The Steiner House, designed by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos, is completed in Vienna

1910 Louis Botha is prime minister of the newly formed Union of South Africa, with Jan Smuts as his minister of interior and defence

1910 Ten men and two women establish the first kibbutz, at Degania in Palestine

1910 Wassily Kandinsky's paintings entitled Compositions are the first examples of purely abstract art

1910 Elizabeth Arden opens her first beauty salon on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan

1910 Rudyard Kipling publishes If, which rapidly becomes his most popular poem among the British

1910 H.G. Wells publishes The History of Mr Polly, a novel about an escape from drab everyday existence

1910 A republican revolution in Portugal deposes Manuel II, bringing to an end the Braganza dynasty and the Portuguese monarchy

1910 Japan annexes Korea as a colony, to be controlled by a Japanese governor-general

1910 Sun Yatsen and others merge several smaller Chinese political groups into the Guomindang, or Nationalist Party

1910 The Gimbel family open their flagship department store in Manhattan

1910 Henri Matisse completes two large paintings, La Danse and La Musique, for the staircase of Sergei Shchukin's house in Moscow

1910 Three French colonies south of the Sahara are consolidated as French Equatorial Africa

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1910 Telegraph messages lead to the arrest of Dr Crippen and his mistress Ethel Le Neve in mid-Atlantic

1910 The critic Roger Fry presents in London's Grafton Galleries an influential exhibition of Post-Impressionist art

1910 The Snowman, a pantomime opera by the 11-year-old Erich Korngold, is a huge succes in Vienna

1910 Alexander Scriabin completes Prometheus, the Poem of Fire, first performed in Moscow in 1911

1910 Charles Stewart Rolls dies in a flying accident shortly after his record cross-Channel flight

1910 A revolution begins in Mexico that will last ten years before being resolved

1910 John Buchan publishes Prester John, the first of his adventure stories

1910 Winston Churchill becomes home secretary in Asquith's Liberal government

1910 The US Congress passes the Mann White Slave Traffic Act, an attempt to control prostitution

1910 Antoni Gaudí completes an apartment block, the Casa Milá, in Barcelona

1910 The Firebird brings together Fokine (choreography), Stravinsky (music) and Golovine and Bakst (sets and costumes)

1910 Schéhérazade, with choreography by Fokine, music by Rimsky-Korsakov and designs by Bakst, is premiered by the Ballets Russes in Paris

1910 Robert Falcon Scott sails south in the Terra Nova on his second voyage towards the South Pole

1910 Charles Stewart Rolls becomes the first man to fly non-stop across the English Channel and back

1910 J.M. Synge's last and unfinished play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, is performed in Dublin shortly after his death

1910 The Union of South Africa becomes an independent dominion within the British empire

1910 Constantine Cavafy prints a few more of his poems to add to the fourteen privately printed in 1904

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1910 Gustav Mahler conducts in Munich the first performance of his Eighth Symphony, subsequently known as the 'Symphony of a Thousand'

1910 May 6 George V succeeds his father, Edward VII, on the British throne

1910 May 6 Edward VII dies in London, after just nine years on the throne

1910 Alban Berg and Anton Webern follow Schoenberg in developing atonal music

1910 Fritz Kreisler is the soloist in the first performance of Edward Elgar's Violin Concerto

1910 In his poem Cargoes John Masefield compares a 'dirty British coaster' with two romantic boats from the past

1910 UK prime minister Herbert Asquith plans to reduce the power of the House of Lords, but the upper house as yet is certain to block any such bill

1910 The Liver Building, surmounted by two legendary Liver Birds, is completed in Liverpool

1910 US geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan establishes the chromosome theory of heredity through his study of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster

1910 Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett perform together at the Folies-Bergère

1910 Chicago cardiologist James Herrick publishes the first account of the cells causing sickle-cell anaemia

1910 Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is first performed in Gloucester

1910 Edward Carson, previously a prominent Conservative politician at Westminster, becomes leader of the Ulster Unionist party

1910 Agnes Baden-Powell establishes the Girl Guides, an organization for girls equivalent to the Scouts

1910 The wife of Harvey Crippen, an American doctor working in north London, vanishes mysteriously

1910 British prime minister Herbert Asquith leads the Liberal party to a narrow victory, in an election fought on the issue of the House of Lords

1910 Lee De Forest broadcasts Enrico Caruso live from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, but with mixed success owing to the poor quality

1910 D.W. Griffith directs In Old California, the first film shot in the California village of Hollywood

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1909 Stands A and B are built and the South Terrace is started at Twickenham Rugby ground .

1909 Joshua Slocum, the most famous sailor of the day, vanishes on another lone voyage

1909 Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Golden Cockerel has its premiere in Moscow

1909 The Conservative majority in the House of Lords rejects Lloyd George's reforming budget, giving the Liberals the chance to call an election on an emotive issue

1909 All Saints is completed, and for thirty years is used for worship as a satellite of St Peter’s, but it is not consecrated

1909 In response to fears of German espionage a Secret Service Bureau, later to be divided into MI5 and MI6, is set up in Britain

1909 President Taft sends marines to Nicaragua after the government there executes two US citizens

1909 Set-designer Leon Bakst begins a long association with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes

1909 Thomas Beecham uses his personal fortune from Beecham's Pills to found his first orchestra, the Beecham Symphony Orchestra

1909 Karl Landsteiner classifies the main human blood groups as A, B, AB and O

1909 Sergei Rachmaninov premieres his Third Piano Concerto during his tour of the USA as a pianist

1909 The Selig Polyscope Company sets up the first film studio in the Los Angeles region, at Edendale

1909 Mineral discoveries on the border of Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo give the first hint of the riches of the Copper Belt

1909 Louis Blériot is the first to fly across the English Channel, winning the £1000 prize offered by the Daily Mail

1909 US physicist Robert A. Millikan devises an oil drop experiment that determines the charge of an electron

1909 President Taft builds the first Oval Office, in the new west wing of the White House

1909 Mahatma Gandhi, on a visit to India, publishes a pamphlet entitled Hind Swaraj ("Indian Home Rule")

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1909 Sea captain Joseph-Elzéar Bernier unveils a plaque in the Arctic Archipelago, declaring that all the islands belong to Canada

1909 US entrepreneur Gordon Selfridge opens the first British custom-built department store on London's Oxford Street

1909 The heroine of H.G. Wells' novel Ann Veronica is a determined example of the New Woman

1909 Fokine's 1907 ballet Chopiniana is revised and given a new name, Les Sylphides

1909 Diaghilev presents the first season of Ballets Russes in Paris, with Pavlova and Nijinsky in the company

1909 Vaughan Williams first symphony, which he names A Sea Symphony, is first performed at the Leeds Festival

1909 15-year-old Andrés Segovia gives his first public performance as a guitarist in Granada

1909 René Lalique, originally known for his jewellery, sets up his own glass-making factory at Combes-la-Ville

1909 Isaac Albéniz completes his series of 12 piano pieces published under the title Iberia.

1909 André Gide publishes La Porte étroite ('Strait is the Gate')

1909 Mary Pickford begins her film career at sixteen, when she is hired by D.W. Griffith

1909 French biologist Charles Nicolle discovers that epidemic typhus is transmitted by the body louse

1909 National delegates from the four provincial parliaments draw up a draft constitution for a South African union

1909 Leo Baekeland announces his discovery of Bakelite, calling it 'the material of a thousand uses'

1909 Arnold Schoenberg composes his opera for a single voice, Erwartung, which remains unperformed until 1924 in Prague

1909 Alexandre Benois becomes the first artistic director of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes

1909 Rugby Union acquires new headquarters and a state-of-the-art stadium at Twickenham

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1909 Italian educational pioneer Maria Montessori publishes The Montessori Method

1909 Ralph Vaughan Williams sets poems by Housman in On Wenlock Edge

1909 becomes the choreographer for the ballet company that Sergei Diaghilev is taking to Paris

1909 The opera Elektra, the first collaboration between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, has its premiere in Dresden

1909 Bernard Leach moves to Japan to study oriental traditions in the graphic arts

1908 The Welsh poet W.H. Davies has a success with The Autobiography of a Super- Tramp, his account of life on the road and in dosshouses

1908 US boxer Jack Johnson becomes the first black heavyweight champion when he knocks out Tommy Burns in Australia

1908 The French critic Louis Vauxcelles describes Braque's latest landscapes as being composed of cubes, resulting in the term cubism

1908 William Howard Taft, the Republican candidate, is elected to follow Roosevelt as president

1908 Europe's worst earthquake, centred on the Strait of Messina, kills up to 200,000 people in Sicily and southern Italy.

1908 Gideons International place their first bible in a hotel bedroom, in Montana, USA

1908 The Empress Dowager Cixi dies the day after selecting the infant Puyi for the Chinese throne

1908 The last Manchu emperor, Puyi, is placed on the throne at the age of two on the death of his uncle, the Guanxu emperor

1908 Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria declares his country's independence from Ottoman rule and calls himself Tsar Ferdinand I

1908 The first Model T Ford rolls off the production line at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit

1908 Alexander Scriabin's orchestral work, Poem of Ecstasy, has its first performance in New York

1908 Arnold Schoenberg abandons tonality in his String Quartet No. 2

1908 Modernist architect Adolf Loos attacks architectural ornament in Ornament and Crime

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1908 George McJunkin, near Folsom in New Mexico, sees the bones of an extinct giant bison, partially exposed after a flash flood, with an ancient spear point embedded in the skeleton

1908 Lucy Maud Montgomery's first novel, Anne of Green Gables, brings her instant fame and fortune

1908 Coffee replaces sugar as Brazil's main crop, for more than 50% of exports in 1908

1908 Parliament in Australia chooses Canberra as the site of the nation's new capital

1908 Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger patents cellophane, a flexible transparent film made from cellulose

1908 After first being discussed at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Conference in 1906, SOS is formally ratified as the international distress signal

1908 Bronislava Nijinska joins her brother Vaslav in the Maryinsky company in St Petersburg

1908 Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird is performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in a production by Stanislavsky

1908 Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes write "Shine on, Harvest Moon" for The Follies of 1908

1908 Augusto Leguía begins a long spell as the strong man of Peruvian politics

1908 German physicist Hans Geiger, working in England with Rutherford, develops an instrument that can detect and count alpha particles

1908 The sides and ramp of Kew Pond are concreted and railings erected all round

1908 International outrage at Congo atrocities forces Belgium to annexe King Leopold's private colony

1908 Claude Debussy completes Children's Corner, pieces for piano which include 'Golliwog's Cake Walk'

1908 Georges Braque's Houses at L'Estaque introduces analytic Cubism

1908 Ernest Shackleton, leading an expedition to the Antarctic, locates the south magnetic pole

1908 The Liberal government in Britain introduces an old-age pension, albeit only five shillings a week.

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1908 Sergei Diaghilev presents Fyodor Chaliapin in Boris Godunov at the Paris Opera

1908 Austria annexes Bosnia-Herzegovina, in response to the policy of the Young Turks in Istanbul

1908 Without financial support from his mother, Hitler ekes out a meagre living painting postcards and advertisements

1908 The Burman Oil Company, developing a concession granted in 1901 to William Knox D'Arcy, discovers oil in Iran

1908 The Polyscope Film Company releases the first horror movie, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, filmed from a popular stage production

1908 David Lloyd George becomes chancellor of the exchequer in Asquith's new cabinet

1908 UK prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman resigns because of ill health and is followed as Liberal leader and prime mininster by Herbert Asquith

1908 Ezra Pound's first book of poems, A Lume Spento, is published in Italy

1908 The Young Turks of Salonika organize a successful uprising against the autocracy of the Ottoman sultan

1908 The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) is set up in Washington

1908 Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer write Take Me Out to the Ball Game, which becomes one of the most popular songs in the USA

1908 A new weekly 'table of diet' is approved by the committee of the National Orphan Home for Females, in Ham

1908 Anatole France casts a satirical eye on human society in his novel L'Île des pingouins ("Penguin Island")

1908 The king of Portugal, Carlos I, and his heir, Luis Filipe, are shot as they ride in an open carriage in Lisbon

1908 Rat, Mole and Toad, in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, appeal to a wide readership

1908 Jack London's novel Iron Heel foresees a future repressive capitalist regime in the USA

1908 Robert Baden-Powell publishes Scouting for Boys, the success of which leads to the establishment of the Scouts

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1907 The Rugby Football Union buys 8.9 acres of land which becomes known as Billy Williams Cabbage Patch from its former agricultural use.

1907 Hitler's mother Klara, to whom he was devoted, dies at the age of forty-seven

1907 Anna Pavlova dances The Dying Swan, choreographed for her by Michel Fokine to music by Saint-Saëns

1907 President Roosevelt sends a fleet of warships on a goodwill tour of the world that also demonstrates US power

1907 20-year-old Le Corbusier builds his first house at La Chaux-de-Fonds, in his native Switzerland

1907 A midwest region, including what remains of the reserved Indian Territory, is included in Oklahoma when it joins the Union as the 46th state

1907 US cartoonist Bud Fisher creates Mutt and Jeff for the San Francisco Chronicle, in the world's first daily comic strip

1907 Harry Lauder has a hit in the USA with his recording of I Love a Lassie

1907 The British liner Lusitania sets a new record for the Atlantic crossing, on the first of four such occasions

1907 New Zealand becomes independent as a self-governing dominion

1907 Swedish playwright August Strindberg publishes The Ghost Sonata, which has its first performance in Stockholm the following year

1907 The National Physical Laboratory begins an ongoing and still continuing task, testing for accuracy the meters of taxi cabs

1907 The Harvester Judgement establishes a minimum wage in Australia

1907 The first International Horse Show takes place in London's Olympia stadium

1907 Samuel Simon, working in Manchester, takes out a patent for the use of silk to support a stencil

1907 Frederick Delius completes Brigg Fair, an 'English Rhapsody' for orchestra, first performed in Liverpool in 1908

1907 The Deutscher Werkbund is founded in Munich as an association of architects, designers and industrialists

1907 The Transvaal government presents to Edward VII the Cullinan diamond, now part of the British crown jewels

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1907 The world's first custom-built motor-racing track opens at Brooklands, near Weybridge in Surrey

1907 Collapse of trust companies causes panic and financial crisis in USA

1907 A fossilized human jaw, probably at least 500,000 years old, is found near Heidelberg in Germany

1907 James Joyce completes the eight short stories eventually published in 1914 as Dubliners

1907 Austrian scientist Clemens von Pirquet discovers a diagnostic test to identify tuberculosis in a patient

1907 Henkel & Cie launches in Düsseldorf the first domestic washing powder, Persil

1907 Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a violent transition into cubism, is a turning point in western art

1907 A separatist party in Spain, Solidaridad Catalana, makes electoral gains in Catalonia

1907 Gertrude Stein meets Alice B. Toklas, who becomes her secretary and lifelong companion

1907 Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev presents five concerts of Russian music in Paris

1907 Charles Stewart Rolls and Henry Royce build their most famous car, the Silver Ghost, in the factory they have set up in Derby

1907 US philosopher William James publishes Pragmatism: a New Name for Old Ways of Thinking

1907 An Entente signed between Britain and Russia follows on from the 1904 Entente Cordiale with France to establish a new Triple Entente

1907 Dutch and British companies (Royal Dutch Oil, Shell Transport and Trading) merge to form Royal Dutch Shell Oil

1907 Edmund Gosse publishes Father and Son, an account of his difficult relationship with his fundamentalist father, Philip Gosse

1907 President Roosevelt sends marines to protect US property during political unrest in Honduras

1907 Russian author Maxim Gorky completes his novel Mat ("The Mother"), written

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mainly during a visit to the USA

1907 Maria Montessori establishes her first Casa dei Bambini in the deprived San Lorenzo district of Rome

1907 Michel Fokine creates the ballet Les Sylphides (originally called Chopiniana) to music by Chopin

1907 Frederick Delius's Walk to the Paradise Garden is added to his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet to cover a scene change during the Berlin premiere

1907 J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World provokes violent reactions at its Dublin premiere

1906 John Galsworthy publishes The Man of Property, the first of his novels chronicling the family of Soames Forsyte

1906 York House is bought by Sir Ratan Tata, an Indian industrialist, who makes some alterations to the house and many to the grounds, including the sunken garden, the stone bridge and the lavish waterfall with marble statuary.

1906 The All-India Muslim League is set up at a meeting of the Muhammadan Educational Conference in Dhaka

1906 Reginald Fessenden transmits on Christmas Eve, from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, the world's first radio broadcast

1906 Transvaal is given the self-governing status promised in the treaty ending the Boer War

1906 The Story of the Kelly Gang, produced in Australia, is the first feature-length film, with a running time of nearly an hour

1906 The Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin introduces land reform

1906 Pesident Roosevelt wins a Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation between Russia and Japan

1906 The German neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer identifies physical symptoms in the brain of a dead woman who had presenile dementia

1906 Roald Amundsen and his crew are the first to achieve the Northwest Passage, in a journey lasting three years in a 70-ft fishing boat

1906 6-year-old Fred Astaire and his sister Adele give their first professional performance, in the pier theatre in Keyport, New Jersey

1906 Ethel Smyth's most successful opera, The Wreckers, is premiered in Leipzig

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1906 German physicist Walther Nernst establishes the Third Law of Thermodynamics, dealing with temperatures close to absolute zero

1906 A pediatrician in Vienna, Clemens von Pirquet, describes a condition for which he coins the term 'allergy'

1906 Sergei Diaghilev mounts a major exhibition of Russian art at the Petit Palais in Paris.

1906 Mahatma Gandhi, confronted by racial discrimination in South Africa, launches a programme of passive resistance (satyagraha)

1906 A large retrospective exhibition in Paris gives Paul Gauguin a growing posthumous reputation

1906 Frank Lloyd Wright builds a Unity Temple for the Unitarians in Oak Park, now a suburb of Chicago

1906 The Great Valparaiso Earthquake damages much of central Chile and is felt from Peru to Buenos Aires

1906 The Cunard company launches the Lusitania on the Clyde as a sister ship to the Mauretania

1906 Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, created by New Yorker J. Stuart Blackton, introduces the concept of the animated cartoon

1906 Alfred Dreyfus is awarded the Légion d'Honneur ten days after his conviction has been annulled

1906 Tsar Nicholas II summarily dismisses Russia's new duma when it has been sitting for only three months

1906 Belgian physiologists Jules Bordet and Octave Gengou identify Bacillus pertussis, the bacterium causing whooping cough

1906 Alfred Dreyfus is reinstated in the army after the French supreme court overturns his conviction for treason

1906 The Pure Food and Drug Act, a landmark initiative in consumer protection, becomes law in the US

1906 Pablo Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein prefigures cubism in its mask-like treatment of her face

1906 The first Grand Prix of motor-racing is held near Le Mans over a 64-mile course

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1906 Harold Macmillan wins a scholarship to the prestigious British public school Eton College

1906 Tsar Nicholas II appoints as prime minister the reformist aristocrat Pyotr Stolypin

1906 In direct response to Britain's new Dreadnought, Germany increases the production of battleships

1906 The Simplon rail tunnel, the longest in the world (20 km), is opened between Switzerland and Italy

1906 E. Nesbit publishes The Railway Children, the most successful of her books featuring the Bastable family

1906 The Naturalization Act provides definitive requirements for naturalization as a US citizen

1906 The first volume of the inexpensive Everyman's Library is issued by Joseph Dent, a London publisher

1906 Charles Pathé opens the first purpose-built luxury cinema, the Omnia-Pathé, in Paris

1906 German immunologist August von Wasserman develops a diagnostic test to reveal the presence of the syphilis spirochaete in the blood

1906 In Charles Ives' composition The Unanswered Question the trumpet repeatedly asks 'the perennial question of existence'

1906 Tsar Nicholas II issues a Fundamental Law emphasizing his own autocratic power

1906 17-year-old Charlie Chaplin joins the Fred Karno company, touring slapstick comedy

1906 Istanbul cedes the Sinai Peninsula to British-controlled Egypt

1906 Antoni Gaudí completes his radical rebuilding of the Casa Batlló in Barcelona

1906 The Liberals win a majority in election for Russia's new duma and press ahead with proposals for land reform

1906 Fire destroys much of San Francisco following the most violent earthquake in the city's history

1906 Frederick Soddy observes his first examples of chemically identical elements with differing atomic weights, to which he later gives the name isotopes

1906 The Grain Growers' Grain Company is established, soon becoming an important

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element in Canada's grain market

1906 A new tram service is launched by London United Tramways on 1 Mar 1906 that crosses Kingston Bridge

1906 An international conference at Algeciras effectively gives France informal control of Morocco

1906 English biologist William Bateson uses the word 'genetics' to describe the phenomenon of heredity and variation

1906 Cardiff's new Civic Centre is launched with the completion of the City Hall and Law Courts, designed by Lanchester, Stewart and Rickards

1906 More than 1200 French miners die in an underground explosion in the district of Calais

1906 Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, a hard-hitting novel about the Chicago meat- packing industry

1906 The first part of the Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna is completed, to the designs of Otto Wagner

1906 Britain launches HMS Dreadnought, the first of a massive new class of battleship

1906 Britain's Labour Party achieves its first electoral success, winning twenty-nine seats at Westminster

1906 Henry Campbell-Bannerman leads the Liberals to a massive election victory in the UK on a promised programme of reform

1905 Sir Percy Blakeney rescues aristocrats from the guillotine in Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel

1905 Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow opens in Vienna at the start of an immensely successful run

1905 Richard Strauss's Salome, based on Oscar Wilde's play, has wide success in spite of censorship difficulties

1905 Conservative prime minister Balfour resigns and Henry Campbell-Bannerman forms an interim Liberal government in Britain

1905 Joseph Stapley dies at 92, after living for 12 years in the Richmond Workhouse

1905 The designer Edward Gordon Craig publishes a theatrical manifesto, The Art of the Theatre

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1905 Bernard Shaw has two new plays opening in London in the same year, Major Barbara and Man and Superman

1905 The monk Grigory Rasputin exercises a powerful influence over the Russian empress Alexandra

1905 Gustav Mahler's cycle of five songs, Kindertotenlieder, hs its first performance in Vienna

1905 Percival Lowell predicts the existence of an unknown planet, almost exactly where Pluto is discovered 25 years later

1905 Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly signs the October Manifesto, authorizing an elected duma or legislature

1905 The Dutch dancer Gertrud Zelle begins a career in Paris, using the stage name Mata Hari

1905 The first soviet ("council") of workers is set up in St Petersburg, introducing a word of great significance in Russian Communist history

1905 Matisse, Derain and others, exhibiting in Paris their shockingly colourful new works, are dubbed fauves ("wild beasts") by a critic

1905 Albert Einstein relates mass and energy in the equation e = mc2

1905 Claude Debussy completes the three symphonic sketches forming La Mer

1905 Britain's Automobile Association is founded, with patrol-men on bicycles to assist drivers

1905 The Treaty of Portsmouth gives Japan control of Port Arthur and much of the Liaotung Peninsula

1905 Aristide Maillol has his first major success with a large sculpture at the Salon d'Automne in Paris

1905 Thomas Dixon's popular novel The Clansman presents the Ku Klux Klan in heroic terms

1905 Hitler moves to Vienna, hoping to be a painter, but is twice rejected as a student by the Academy of Fine Arts

1905 President Thedore Roosevelt mediates a peace treaty in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, between Russia and Japan

1905 US philosopher George Santayana publishes the first of the five volumes of his Life of Reason

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1905 The German commander in east Africa uses famine as a means of ending the Maji- Maji rising

1905 H.G. Wells publishes Kipps: the story of a simple soul, a comic novel about a bumbling draper's assistant

1905 The first German submarine, or U-boat, is constructed in a programme to catch up with Britain and France in this area

1905 Beatrix Potter buys Hill Top Farm, in Sawrey, where for nearly thirty years she breeds a local variety of sheep

1905 The Maji-Maji rising results in alarming outbreaks of violence in German East Africa

1905 English physiologists William Bayliss and Ernest Starling coin the word 'hormone' for glandular secretions into the bloodstream

1905 A complaint about maggotty meat on the Russian battleship Potemkin leads to thousands of deaths after troops fire on a demonstration

1905 The first boat to be powered by a combustion engine, the 125-ton vessel Venoga, is launched on Lake Geneva

1905 Henri Matisse, in the south of France, paints The Open Window, Collioure, the first of his many works on this theme

1905 Edith Wharton publishes the novel that brings her fame and fortune, The House of Mirth

1905 The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin becomes influenced by the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky 1

905 The Ulster Unionist Party is founded in Belfast to oppose Home Rule

1905 Karol Szymanowski and other Polish composers form a group that soon becomes known as Young Poland

1905 Alberta and Saskatchewan join the Canadian confederation, completing the 'prairie provinces'

1905 David Belasco's play Girl of the Golden West has its premiere in New York, where it is seen two years later by Giacomo Puccini

1905 Pablo Picasso's palette becomes warmer as Blue evolves into Rose

1905 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and other Dresden students form the Expressionist group Die Brücke

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1905 French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon develop a scale by which to measure the 'mental age' of children

1905 US photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen set up the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York

1905 Henri Matisse completes his painting Luxe, Calme et Volupté

1905 In his special theory of relativity Albert Einstein reconciles the apparent clash between relativity and electromagnetic theory

1905 Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, a letter of recrimination written in Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas, is published posthumously

1905 The largest diamond yet known is found in a South African mine belonging to Thomas Cullinan

1905 Two thirds of the Russian fleet is sunk after being ambushed by Japanese warships in the Tsushima Strait

1905 Kaiser Wilhelm II visits Tangier in support of Moroccan independence, causing a diplomatic crisis with the colonial powers France and Britain

1905 English engineer Herbert Austin sets up a factory to manufacture cars at Longbridge, south of Birmingham

1905 The Japanese defeat a larger force of Russians at Mukden in the final land battle of the Russo-Japanese War

1905 More than 360,000 Norwegians vote to end the union with Sweden, with only 184 against

1905 Henry Wood sets 'Rule Britannia' in his Fantasia on British Sea Songs, providing a traditional favourite for the last night of the Proms

1905 Albert Einstein explains the photoelectric effect as a flow of discreet particles (quanta) of electromagnetic radiation

1905 Strikes and riots sweep across Russia in the wake of St Petersburg's Bloody Sunday

1905 The Bloomsbury Group gathers for informal evenings at the family home of Virginia and Vanessa Stephens (later Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell)

1905 Industrial Workers of the World (with its members later known as Wobblies) is founded in Chicago as a radical union initiative

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1905 Troops fire on a demonstration in St Petersburg, in the event which becomes known as Bloody Sunday

1905 The American sculptor Jacob Epstein moves from New York to settle in London

1905 Transvaal politician Louis Botha forms Het Volk ('The People'), a party committed to Afrikaner self-government

1904 Gwen John makes her home in Paris, where she becomes Rodin's model and mistress

1904 Dublin's Abbey Theatre opens as a new home for the Irish National Theatre Society

1904 US president Theodore Roosevelt announces the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, in response to crises in Latin America

1904 Australian soprano Nellie Melba makes the first of a great many recordings

1904 Under the pseudonym Saki, H.H. Munro publishes Reginald, his first volume of short stories

1904 US inventor King Gillette receives a patent for a disposable safety razor

1904 Theodore Roosevelt wins the US presidental election in his own right

1904 US architect Louis Sullivan completes the Schlesinger & Meyer Store (later known as the Carson, Pirie & Scott Store) in Chicago

1904 Alexander Scriabin completes his Third Symphony, The Divine Poem, which is given its first performance in Paris in 1905

1904 Alban Berg and Anton Webern study composition with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna

1904 J.M Barrie's play for children Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up has its premiere in London

1904 The publisher Walter Blackie moves into Hill House at Helensburgh, designed for him by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

1904 British troops under Francis Younghusband enter Tibet's holy city of Lhasa

1904 Hughie Cannon writes the music and words for the song originally titled "He Done Me Wrong" in the US musical Frankie and Johnny

1904 Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud publishes The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

1904 The US consul in Mexico, Edward Herbert Thompson, begins a very profitable

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excavation at the Mayan site of Chichén Itzá

1904 Constantine Cavafy prints fourteen of his poems in a pamphlet for private distribution

1904 An observatory with a 100-inch reflecting telescope is set up by George Ellery Hale on Mount Wilson in California

1904 Henry James publishes his last completed novel, The Golden Bowl

1904 The German general Lothar von Trotha drives 8000 Herrero people to slow death in the Kalahari desert

1904 Helen Keller overcomes deafness and blindness to graduate cum laude at Radcliffe College in the USA

1904 Wisley, in Surrey, is developed as the garden of Britain's Royal Horticultural Society

1904 France and Britain sign an Entente Cordiale, resolving several colonial disputes and laying the foundation for a new alliance

19048 A new nave, chancel and north aisle, designed by Charles Innes, are added to St Mary's

1904 Joseph Conrad publishes his novel Nostromo, about a revolution in South America and a fatal horde of silver

1904 John Christian Watson becomes Australia's first Labor prime minister, leading a minority government that survives for only four months

1904 A surprise Japanese attack on Russian warships in Port Arthur launches the Russo- Japanese War for influence in the Far East

1904 Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly falls victim at La Scala to claques paid for by rivals

1904 A violent uprising by Herrero warriors in South West Africa targets male Germans of military age

1904 J.M. Synge's play Riders to the Sea has its premiere at the Molesworth Hall in Dublin

1904 Finnish architect Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen wins the competition to build Helsinki's railway station

1904 Leos Janacek's opera Jenufa, based on a play by Gabriela Preissová, has its premiere in Brno

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1904 Anton Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard, is staged by Stanislavsky just a few months before the author's death

1904 Charles Rolls and Henry Royce meet in a historic encounter in Manchester and launch their first car, the Rolls-Royde 10 hp, later in this same year.

1903 Radnor House and grounds are opened to the public.

1903 Orville Wright travels 40 yards in the first successful powered flight, at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina

1903 Work begins on England's first garden city, at Letchworth, based on the theories of Ebenezer Howard

1903 Italian tenor Enrico Caruso makes his US debut at the New York Metropolitan Opera

1903 The USA is granted exclusive control in perpetuity of a ten-mile corridor across Panama, suitable for a canal

1903 Charles Rennie Mackintosh completes the Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow for Miss Cranston

1903 Britain's first national motor show is organized at the Crystal Palace, moving two years later to Olympia

1903 The first World Series is played between nine leading baseball teams from the National League and the American League

1903 The Pit, the second volume of an uncompleted trilogy by US novelist Frank Norris, is published posthumously

1903 US author W.E.B. Du Bois publishes his first collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk

1903 William Harley and three Davidson brothers begin the commercial production in Milwaukee of motorcycles, but complete only three by the end of the year

1903 The Colombian government rejects the Hay-Herrán treaty with the US on the Panama canal, thus prompting the break-away of Panama

1903 Maurice Ravel sets to music romantic oriental poems by Tristan Klingsor in his song-cycle Shéhérazade

1903 A US warship appears off the coast of Panama in support of rebels declaring an independent republic

1903 British philosopher G.E. Moore publishes Principia Ethica, an attempt to apply logic to ethics

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1903 Giuseppe Sarto is elected pope and takes the name Pius X

1903 Edwin S. Porter directs The Great Train Robbery, providing a big commercial success for Thomas Edison's film company

1903 An eight-storey riverside brick building, for use in the process of malting, is added to the ever-expanding Mortlake brewery

1903 Roger Casement, British consul in the Congo Free State, discovers appalling abuses by Belgian companies

1903 Edward VII, the first British monarch to travel to India, holds a great coronation durbar in Delhi

1903 Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy identify the phenomenon of radioactive half- life

1903 The present granite Kew bridge, designed by Sir John Wolfe Barry and wider and flatter than its predecessor, is completed. The Ceremonial Opening is performed by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.

1903 Henry James publishes The Ambassadors, the second of his three last novels written in rapid succession

1903 In a paper to a congress in Madrid, on the 'psychology and psychopathology of animals', Ivan Pavlov announces his discovery of the conditioned reflex

1903 King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia are murdered in their palace by army officers

1903 Alois Hitler, violent, feared and greatly disliked by his son Adolf, dies

1903 Erskine Childers has a best-seller in The Riddle of the Sands, a thriller about a planned German invasion of Britain

1903 José Battle is elected president of Uruguay and proves to be a visionary politician

1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founds the Women's Social and Political Union to fight for women's political rights in the UK

1903 Gertrude Stein leaves the USA to share with her brother an apartment in Paris that soon becomes a literary and artistic salon

1903 Sibelius writes Valse Triste as incidental music to a play, Kuolema, by his brother-in- law Arvid Järnefelt

1903 German surgeon Georg Clemens Perthes discovers, in Leipzig, that X-rays can

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inhibit cancer

1903 Lenin's supporters become known as the Bolsheviks ('majority') as opposed to the Mensheviks ('minority') after a split at the party's Second Congress

1903 US author Jack London publishes a novel, The Call of the Wild, in which a huge pet dog has alarming adventures

1903 Cuba is forced to accept a permanent US military presence in Guantanamo Bay

1903 The Wizard of Oz, based on the book by Frank Baum, opens on Broadway as a musical to huge success

1902 The English painter G.F. Watts is made a founding member of the Order of Merit

1902 Joseph Conrad publishes a collection of stories including Heart of Darkness, a sinister tale based partly on his own journey up the Congo

1902 Radnor House is bought by Twickenham Urban district Council.

1902 The first Aswan dam, at this time the world's largest, is completed on the Nile

1902 Brooklyn shopkeepers Morris and Rose Michtom have a huge success with their presidential 'Teddy's Bear'

1902 William K. Vanderbilt drives the first internal-combustion car to win the land speed record, at 76 mph at Ablis in France

1902 The tenor Enrico Caruso cuts his first phonograph records in Milan, beginning an immensely successful recording career

1902 Gustav Mahler marries Alma, daughter of the artist Emil Jakob Schindler

1902 French film pioneer Georges Méliès uses trick effects for his film Journey to the Moon

1902 Henry James publishes the first of his three last novels, The Wings of the

1902 Claude Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande has its premiere in Paris

1902 W.B. Yeats heads a group of writers and directors in establishing the Irish National Theatre Society

1902 Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles begins publication in serial form

1902 Maxim Gorky's play The Lower Depths is performed at the Moscow Art Theatre

1902 Hughie Cannon writes 'Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home' for a minstrel,

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John Queen

1902 John Masefield's poem 'Sea Fever' is published in Salt-Water Ballads

1902 Augustus John meets his favourite subject Dorothy McNeill, to whom he gives the Gypsy name Dorelia

1902 The sculptor Aristide Maillol has his first one-man exhibition, at the Galerie Vollard in Paris

1902 Lord Salisbury resigns as British prime minister and is succeeded by his nephew, A.J. Balfour

1902 The Tale of Peter Rabbit is published commercially, a year after being first printed by Beatrix Potter at her own expense

1902 The three-year Philippine-American War is brought to an end, and the Philippines become a US colony

1902 'Land of Hope and Glory' features in its lasting form as the finale of Elgar's Coronation Ode for Edward VII

1902 After the defeat of neighbouring Transvaal in the Boer War, the British take sole control of Swaziland

1902 Irish politician Arthur Griffith launches Sinn Fein, as an organization campaigning for a strong and independent Ireland

1902 Jane Burt finally wins admission to Houblon's Almshouses, on the nineteenth attempt

1902 Charles Pathé develops film facilities capable of mass production, in Vincennes near Paris

1902 A treaty at Vereeniging ends the Boer War and brings the Boer republics under British control

1902 Rudyard Kipling moves to Bateman's in Sussex, his home for the rest of his life

1902 Lord Salisbury resigns as British prime minister and is succeeded by his nephew, A.J. Balfour

1902 The Tale of Peter Rabbit is published commercially, a year after being first printed by Beatrix Potter at her own expense

1902 The three-year Philippine-American War is brought to an end, and the Philippines become a US colony

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1902 'Land of Hope and Glory' features in its lasting form as the finale of Elgar's Coronation Ode for Edward VII

1902 After the defeat of neighbouring Transvaal in the Boer War, the British take sole control of Swaziland

1902 Irish politician Arthur Griffith launches Sinn Fein, as an organization campaigning for a strong and independent Ireland

1902 Jane Burt finally wins admission to Houblon's Almshouses, on the nineteenth attempt

1902 Charles Pathé develops film facilities capable of mass production, in Vincennes near Paris

1902 A treaty at Vereeniging ends the Boer War and brings the Boer republics under British control

1902 Rudyard Kipling moves to Bateman's in Sussex, his home for the rest of his life

1902 Cuba becomes independent after three years of US military rule, with certain restrictions imposed by the Platt Amendment of 1901

1902 The US Congress makes the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 permanent, without the need for ten-year renewals

1902 The play Cathleen ni Houlihan, by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, fosters Irish nationalism

1902 A.E. Kennelly and Oliver Heaviside independently see the link between the atmosphere and the behaviour of radio waves

1902 North Carolina pharmacist Caleb Bradham launches the Pepsi-Cola company in a back room of his shop

1902 French automobile pioneer Leon Serpollet sets a new land speed record, driving a steam car at 75 mph along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice

1902 Helen Keller's The Story of My Life begins publication in serial form

1902 Alfred Stieglitz and other US photographers launch the Photo-Secession movement

1902 In his pamphlet What is to be done? Lenin argues for early action to promote revolution

1902 The road outside Garrick's Villa is widened for the coming of the trams and the house is bought by London United Tramways. General Manager Clifton Robinson occupies the villa

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1902 US philosopher William James publishes his influential book The Varieties of Religious Experience

1902 Rudyard Kipling publishes his Just So Stories for Little Children

1902 Venezuela defaults on European interest payments and is soon threatened by British, German and Italian warships

1902 Ebenezer Howard republishes his earlier book of 1898 as Garden Cities of Tomorrow

1902 Edith Wharton's publishes her first full-length novel, The Valley of Decision

1902 After opposition to the development, the Marble Hill estate is bought for £70,000 by funds from local authorities and individuals. The property is held by the London County Council, subsequently the Greater London Council.

1901 Frank Hornby begins to market in Britain his immensely successful Meccano kits

1901 Stephen Wheeler is left as the last of the lightermen to use the St Helena Boathouses for coal and freight, and increasingly switches the focus of his business to the trade of boat-hiring.

1901 The 1901 census reveals that the population of the United Kingdom has almost doubled in 50 years, to 38 million

1901 Vice President Theodore Roosevelt becomes US president on McKinley's death

1901 President McKinley is assassinated by an anarchist when visiting the Pan-American exhibition in Buffalo

1901 Australia passes an Immigration Restriction Act to underpin the White Australia policy

1901 Robert Falcon Scott sets off in the Discovery on his first expedition to the Antarctic

1901 Guglielmo Marconi transmits a radio message in Morse code 2100 miles, from Poldhu in Cornwall to St John's in Newfoundland

1901 Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters has its premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Stanislavsky

1901 Charles Rennie Mackintosh designs the interior of Miss Cranston's Ingram Street Tea Rooms in Glasgow

1901 Frederick Delius completes his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, but it is not performed until 1907 in Berlin

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1901 The Texas oil industry is launched with the disovery of the 75,000-barrel-a-day Lucas Gusher near Beaumont

1901 The Leyborne-Pophams start selling off the market gardens and then the farm buildings of East Sheen and West Hall for housing and cemeteries and sewage works

1901 Sergei Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto gives him renewed confidence after the disaster of his First Symphony in 1897

1901 The first of Edward Elgar's five Pomp and Circumstance marches has a trio section that becomes "Land of Hope and Glory"

1901 The Austrian biochemist Karl Landsteiner discovers that human blood is of varying types

1901 Frank Lloyd Wright designs low residential buildings, suitable for the plains around Chicago, and calls them Prairie Houses

1901 The British batsman C.B. Fry hits a record six consecutive centuries in first-class cricket

1901 A change of palette by Pablo Picasso takes him into what becomes known as his Blue Period

1901 Rudyard Kipling's experiences of India are put to good use in his novel Kim

1901 The concept of instant coffee is developed in Chicago by the Japanese American chemist Satori Kato

1901 Ransome Eli Olds manufactures the Curved Dash Oldsmobile on assembly line principles in Detroit

1901 Beatrix Potter publishes at her own expense The Tale of Peter Rabbit

1901 Charles Voysey completes a house for himself, The Orchard, at Chorley Wood in Hertfordshire

1901 A stele is found at Susa, in Iran, giving the text of the Code of Hammurabi

1901 Thomas Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, brings him immediate success

1901 Rusalka, by the Czech composer Anton Dvorák, is performed in Prague

1901 Photographer Eadweard Muybridge extends the range of his studies with Human Figure in Motion

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1901 Thousands of women and children die in the concentration camps used by the British army for displaced Boer families

1901 Vast crowds line the streets for the Milan funeral of a national hero, the 87-year-old composer Giuseppe Verdi

1901 Edward VII is already 59 when he succeeds his mother, Victoria, as Britain's monarch

1901 dies at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, after 63 years on the throne

1901 Six separate Australian colonies combine to form the independent Commonwealth of Australia

1901 Daimler cars launch a new brand, the Mercedes 35 hp, named after the ten-year-old daughter of the and distributor Emil Jellinek

1900 The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov keeps dogs alive almost indefinitely by severely curtailing their bodily functions

1900 The Welsh painter Augustus John becomes Britain's most famous bohemian

1900 Humbert I, the king of Italy, is assassinated by an Italian-American anarchist, Gaetano Bresci

1900 Joseph Conrad publishes his novel Lord Jim about a life of failure and redemption in the far East

1900 Lenin and comrades launch in Munich a radical newspaper, Iskra ('the spark')

1900 German physicist Max Planck proposes the revolutionary concept of the quantum theory

1900 Gustave Charpentier's opera Louise has Paris premiere at the Opéra-Comique

1900 Edward Elgar writes the oratorio Dream of Gerontius, setting Cardinal Newman's poem of the same title

1900 In the US presidential election William McKinley wins a second term on a simple platform, promising 'the full dinner pail'

1900 Wilbur and Orville Wright test a biplane glider at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina

1900 Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya is directed by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre

1900 The Voice of the People is the first of Ellen Glasgow's novels set in her native state,

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Virginia

1900 The American League emerges from baseball's Western League, before going national in 1901

1900 Queen Victoria gives permission for the newly founded National Physical Laboratory to move into Bushy House and its grounds

1900 More than 8000 people die when a hurricane demolishes the seaside resort of Galveston in Texas

1900 The Irish Parliamentary Party, which split after the Parnell divorce case, reunites under the leadership of John Redmond

1900 Australia's Salvation Army produces an ambitious presentation of film and slides in Soldiers of the Cross

1900 Sigmund Freud publishes one of his most significant works, The Interpretation of Dreams

1900 Theodore Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie, receives no publicity because his publisher, Frank Doubleday, considers it immoral

1900 Jean Sibelius's Finlandia stirs national instincts in Helsinki

1900 The British government assumes direct responsibility for the entire region of Nigeria, previously entrusted to a commercial company

1900 Jack London's first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf, brings him a wide readership

1900 Charles Stewart Rolls wins the Automobile Club's Thousand Mile Trial in a 12 horse- power Panhard

1900 Ferdinand Zeppelin's first dirigible makes its test flight from a floating hangar on the Lake of Constance

1900 The Bayer company in Germany sells aspirin in the form of water-soluble tablets, the first medication of its kind

1900 Joshua Slocum publishes Sailing Alone Around the World, an account of his famous 18958 circumnavigation

1900 Harvey Firestone sets up the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio

1900 Hostility to foreign intrusion erupts in China with the Boxer Rising

1900 After a prodigiously productive career as novelist and journalist, Stephen Crane dies

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of tuberculosis at the age of 28

1900 Rubber brings prosperity to Manaus, thousands of miles up the Amazon

1900 The relief of Mafeking ends a long siege which brings fame to the British commander of the garrison, Robert Baden-Powell

1900 Keir Hardie is returned to parliament for Merthyr Tydfil, beginning a long and close link between the Labour party and Wales.

1900 Enrique Granados completes the ten piano pieces forming his Danzas españolas

1900 Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife exhibit together at the Sezession show in Vienna

1900 The Conservatives win an increased majority during the Boer War, in what becomes known as the 'khaki election'

1900 David Belasco's play Madame Butterfly has its premiere in New York, and is subsequently seen in London by Giacomo Puccini

1900 Scottish music-hall artist Harry Lauder makes his first London appearance at Gatti's music hall in Westminster

1900 Frank Baum introduces children to Oz, in his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

1900 Puerto Ricans are granted limited democracy in a bill of rigfhts introduced after two years of US military occupation

1900 Paul Kruger flees after the British take Pretoria and annexe both the Boer republics

1900 Isadora Duncan dances professionally for the first time in Europe in London's Lyceum Theatre

1900 The faction founded in Bohemia by Tomas Masaryk becomes known as the Progressive party

1900 Giacomo Puccini's Tosca brings in the new century with a January premiere in Rome

1900 The Central London (Tube) Railway charges a flat rate

1899 E. Nesbit publishes The Story of the Treasure Seekers, introducing the Bastable family who feature in several of her books for children

1899 A new theatre opens on the Green in Richmond, designed by a speciallist in theatre architecture, Frank Matcham

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1899 John Kelly (1840-1904) designs All Saints, Petersham, in the style of a Romanesque basilica

1899 Ranjitsinhji becomes the first cricketer to score 3000 runs in a single season

1899 Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg composes the string sextet Verklärte Nacht

1899 Ten days after the court martial's verdict, Alfred Dreyfus is given a pardon by the president of France

1899 At a retrial of Alfred Dreyfus a martial confirms his conviction for treason

1899 US Secretary of State John Hay circulates a proposal that western powers should adopt an open-to-all trading policy in China

1899 Within a single 'Black Week' the British forces in South Africa suffer three defeats, at Stromberg, Magersfontein and Colenso

1899 Edward Elgar teases with the word 'enigma' printed at the head of his orchestral Variations on an Original Theme

1899 The Boer War breaks out, ostensibly over the rights of British settlers in the Transvaal

1899 Marconi equips two ships to send radio reports to New York on the progress of the yachts racing for the America's Cup

1899 US social scientist Thorstein Veblen publishes The Theory of the Leisure Class, an attack on capitalist exploitation and 'consumerism'

1899 Mohammed ibn Abdullah (the Mad Mullah in British eyes) leads an uprising in British Somaliland

1899 Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in transmitting a wireless telegraph message across the English Channel

1899 Belgian racing driver Camille Jenatzy is the first to drive faster than a mile a minute, reaching 65 mph in an electric car at Achères in France

1899 The War of a Thousand Days begins in Colombia, causing eventually 100,000 deaths

1899 The Sudan begins half a century of supposedly joint rule by Britain and Egypt

1898 The Australian soprano Nellie Melba forms the Melba Grand Opera Company as a touring venture in the USA

1898 Henry James publishes The Turn of the Screw in a collection of short stories

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1898 English town-planner Ebenezer Howard puts forward a Utopian scheme in Tomorrow a Peaceful Path to Real Reform

1898 Marconi launches a factory in Chelmsford, England, for the purpose of manufacturing radios ('wirelesses' in the language of the time)

1898 H.G. Wells publishes his science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, in which Martians arrive in a rocket to invade earth

1898 The agreement ending the Spanish-American War includes Spain selling the Philippines to the USA for a payment of $20 million

1898 In the Treaty of Paris, ending the Spanish-American War, Spain cedes Puerto Rico and Cuba to the USA

1898 Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the element radium, working without any protection because unaware of the danger of radioactivity

1898 Richmond Golf Club is established at Sudbrook Park

1898 Kitchener's victory at Omdurman brings to an end thirteen years of rule in Sudan by followers of the Mahdi

1898 5-year-old Mary Pickford plays her first professional role on stage

1898 US basketball becomes a professional game with the establishment in Philadelphia of the National Basketball League

1898 French and British forces meet at Fashoda, in a potentially explosive incident in the scramble for Africa

1898 Marie Curie and her husband Pierre isolate a new element which they name polonium in honour of her native Poland

1898 British chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers isolate the element xenon

1898 Joshua Slocum reaches Newport, Rhode Island, after sailing 46,000 miles to achieve the first solo voyage round the world

1898 Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, succeeds at the Moscow Art Theatre

1898 Winston Churchill gallops into battle with the Twenty-First Lancers at Omdurman

1898 British chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers isolate the element neon

1898 Theodore Roosevelt fights against the Spanish in Cuba with a volunteer regiment of

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cavalry, the Rough Riders

1898 Henry James moves from London to Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, which remains his home for the rest of his life

1898 British chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers isolate the element c

1898 The Philippines declare independence from the colonial power, Spain, with whom they are at war

1898 Russian forces seize the strategically important Chinese harbour known in the west as Port Arthur

1898 The Hawaiian islands are made a US territory, five years after American involvement in the overthrow of the ruling dynasty

1898 The Cunard family, then living close by at Orleans House, buy the Marble Hill estate for £36,000 with the intention of creating a housing estate.

1898 The US battleship Maine is blown up in Havana harbour, sparking off the Spanish- American War

1898 The National Consumers' League, headed by Florence Kelley, fights for improved conditions in the US factories making consumer goods

1898 publishes Women and Economics, developing the feminist theme in US cultural and political life

1898 Émile Zola sends an open letter to the French president, headed 'J'accuse!', drawing attention to the injustice done to Alfred Dreyfus

1898 Germany passes the first of four Fleet Acts, reflecting the determination of Alfred von Tirpitz to build a navy equal to that of Britain

1897 Rachmaninov's First Symphony has a disastrous premiere in St Petersburg, probably caused by the incompetence of Glazunov as conductor

1897 British physician Ronald Ross identifies the Anopheles mosquito as the carrier of malaria

1897 English author Bram Stoker publishes Dracula, his gothic tale of vampirism in Transylvania

1897 Adolph Ochs, a new proprietor of The New York Times, coins the slogan 'All the News That's Fit to Print'

1897 Somerset Maugham publishes his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, based on the London life he has observed as a medical student

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1897 , powered by the newly invented Parsons steam turbine, breaks the speed record when Queen Victoria reviews her fleet

1897 Diamond Jubilee bonfires and fireworks all round Britain celebrate Victoria's sixty years on the throne

1897 The first Zionist Congress is held in Basel with Theodor Herzl in the chair

1897 The British burn Benin City in a punitive expedition after members of a British delegation are murdered

1897 To accommodate the increasing number of children, the Queen’s School is rebuilt on three storeys

1897 The French exile the queen of Madagascar and claim the island as a French colony

1897 Germany claims Ruanda and Urundi as a joint colony adjacent to German East Africa

1897 Henry James views the feckless adults in Maisie's life through the eyes of the child herself in What Maisie Knew

1897 The UK colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, appoints enthusiastic imperialist Alfred Milner as high commissioner in South Africa

1897 English physicist Joseph John Thomson, working at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, discovers the existence of the electron

1897 Paul Kruger, prime minister of the Transvaal, forms an alliance with the other Boer republic, the Orange Free State

1897 Zululand, annexed by Britain in 1887, is now merged with the colony of Natal

1897 Jewish composer Gustav Mahler is baptized a Christian so as to be eligible to conduct the Vienna Opera

1897 The Spanish governor in Cuba is recalled to Spain, for pioneering the concept of the concentration camp

1897 The Duc D'Orleans, who had been born at York House in 1869, buys the house and makes major alterations. These include a new east wing housing a museum and swimming pool, and walling the riverside grounds.

1896 22-year-old Guglielmo Marconi takes out a patent in Britain for the invention of radio

1896 Republican candidate William McKinley wins the US presidential election, defeating Democrat William Jennings Bryan

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1896 Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull has a disastrous premiere in St Petersburg (but is well received two years later in Moscow)

1896 English poet A.E. Housman publishes his first collection, A Shropshire Lad

1896 Italy, one of the local colonial powers, accepts Ethiopia's claim to the Ogaden region of the Somali territory

1896 Reports of gold in what becomes known as Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Klondike, prompt a massive gold rush into the Yukon

1896 Jean Sibelius's 'symphonic legend' The Swan of Tuonela has its premiere in Helsinki

1896 Otto Lilienthal dies when a wing fractures on his glider and he crashes from a height of 17 metres

1896 The first modern Olympic Games, organized by Pierre de Coubertin, are held in Athens

1896 The Dutch House is acquired by Kew Gardens and a few years later is opened to the public

1896 Britain unites Buganda and three other kingdoms into the single Uganda Protectorate

1896 Theodor Herzl publishes The Jewish State, calling for a national homeland for all Jews

1896 US engineer Henry Ford test drives his first four-wheel internal-combustion vehicle, the Quadricycle, built in a coal shed behind his home

1896 French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel discovers in uranium salt the phenomenon of natural radioactivity

1896 Canada's first French-speaking and Roman Catholic premier, Wilfrid Laurier, wins the first of four consecutive spells as premier

1896 The US Supreme Court rules in Plessey v. Ferguson that it is legal for a state to provide 'separate but equal' facilities for blacks

1896 The Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II, inflicts a shattering defeat on Italian forces at Aduwa

1896 The prolific US poet Edwin Arlington Robinson publishes The Torrent and the Night Before, his first poems about the fictional Tilbury Town

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1896 Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème has an unsuccessful premiere in Turin

1896 Cecil Rhodes' involvement with the Jameson raid forces his resignation as the Cape Colony prime minister

1896 Utah is admitted to the union as the 45th state, after the Mormons agree to give up

1895 A promenade concert, presented by Henry Wood in London's Queen's Hall, turns out to be the beginning of a very long tradition

1895 Gwen John persuades a reluctant father to allow her to follow her younger brother to the Slade School of Art in London

1895 H.G. Wells publishes The Time Machine, a story about a Time Traveller whose first stop on his journey is the year 802701

1895 Leander Jameson leads a disastrous raid into the Transvaal, in an attempt to topple Paul Kruger's government

1895 Lenin is arrested in St Petersburg, along with other members of the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class

1895 German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovers rays that can penetrate light-proof barriers, and names them x-rays because their nature is as yet unknown

1895 General Alfred von Schlieffen devises plans for a potential two-pronged attack against France and Russia in a swift war

1895 The British government takes responsibility for Kenya, as the East Africa Protectorate

1895 The Limes becomes the seat of local government in Mortlake, and remains so until 1940

1895 Oscar Wilde is sent to Reading Gaol to serve a two-year sentence with hard labour after being convicted of homosexuality

1895 The USGA (US Golf Association) stages the first national amateur and open championships

1895 Australia has a catchy new song in "Waltzing Matilda", written by Banjo Paterson to music by Christina Macpherson

1895 Lord Rosebery's Liberal government suffers a defeat in the House of Commons, and Lord Salisbury returns as Britain's prime minister

1895 21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in transmitting a radio signal more than a

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mile at his home near Bologna

1895 Oscar Wilde loses a libel case that he has brought against the marquess of Queensberry for describing him as a sodomite

1895 Joshua Slocum sails from Boston in his sloop Spray for his attempt at a solo circumnavigation of the world

1895 Khama III, the king of Bechuanaland, travels to London to demand the continuing protection of the British crown

1895 At the end of the Sino-Japanese war China cedes to Japan the island of Taiwan, together with Port Arthur and the Liadong peninsula

1895 Stephen Crane succeeds handsomely with his second novel, The Red Badge of Courage, set in the American Civil War

1895 Scottish chemist William Ramsay isolates the element helium

1895 The territory south of the Zambezi is given the name Rhodesia, in honour of the man who has colonized it

1895 Japan's navy destroys the remains of China's fleet at Weihaiwei

1895 Oscar Wilde's most brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest is performed in London's St. James Theatre

1895 Swan Lake is performed in St Petersburg in its definitive version, with choreography shared between Lucien Petipa and Lev Ivanov

1894 The tenor Enrico Caruso makes his debut in his home town of Naples

1894 The first competitive event for cars is held over a distance of 78 miles from Paris to Rouen

1894 Claude Debussy's tone poem L'Après-midi d'un faune has its premiere in Paris

1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, is convicted of treason and sent to Devil's Island in French Guiana

1894 Brazil's first civilian president, Prudente de Morais, is peacefully elected, setting the pattern for the next four decades

1894 William Randolph Hearst buys the New York Journal, the first of numerous purchases in building up his press empire

1894 Japan and China go to war over Korea, with disastrous results for China

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1894 Scottish physicist William Ramsay isolates argon, following Rayleigh's discovery that an undiscovered gas combines with nitrogen in the air

1894 The Basque Nationalist Party is founded, beginning more than a century of separatist unrest in northwest Spain

1894 London's Tower Bridge raises its roadway for the first time to let a ship pass up the Thames

1894 US Socialist Eugene Debs comes to prominence as leader of a strike by railway workers against the Pullman Company

1894 Wealthy US astronomer Percival Lowell builds an observatory at Mars Hill in Flagstaff, Arizona

1894 Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book surrounds the child Mowgli with a collection of vivid animal guardians

1894 French-born artist and author George du Maurier publishes his novel Trilby

1894 France and Russia, alarmed by Germany's ambitions, sign a defensive Franco- Russian alliance

1894 Gladstone retires as Britain's prime minister and his place is taken by his foreign secretary, Lord Rosebery

1894 Harold Macmillan is born in London, son of the publisher Maurice Macmillan and his American wife, Nellie Tarleton

1893 Hansel and Gretl, an opera by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck, has its premiere in Weimar

1893 Joseph Stapley, aged 80, is the oldest of the five paupers admitted to the Richmond Workhouse on December 1

1893 Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky dies after a short illness, possibly from cholera or perhaps in sinister circumstances that remain the subject of controversy

1893 France incorporates Laos within French Indochina

1893 Tchaikovsky's symphony no. 6, known as the 'Pathetic' or Pathétique, has its premiere in St Petersburg

1893 The Scottish game of shinty is provided with a standardized set of rules

1893 Anton Dvorák's Ninth Symphony, subtitled 'From the New World', has its first performance in New York

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1893 After a gap of 30 years, work resumes on the Temperate House. Eventually, after the bankruptcy of one contractor, it opens in May 1899 as the world's largest plant house.

1893 The Gaelic League is founded to restore the use of Gaelic as Ireland's spoken language

1893 George Westinghouse demonstrates the advantages of AC (Alternating Current) when he provides 100,000 lights for the Chicago World's Fair

1893 The British Central African Protectorate is set up in the region of present-day Malawi

1893 Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen sails into the Arctic in the purpose-built , beginning a three-year expedition to reach the North Pole

1893 Mahatma Gandhi, travelling with a first-class ticket, is forcibly ejected from the carriage at Pietermaritzburg because of his colour

1893 Decline in the federal gold reserve and panic by prompts a spectacular crash in the US economy

1893 Frank Hornby patents in Liverpool his Meccano construction system for children

1893 Gladstone finally gets a Home Rule bill through the Commons, only to have it rejected in the Lords

1893 Leander Jameson, finding a pretext for war, drives Lobengula out of his kingdom in Rhodesia

1893 S author Stephen Crane cannot find a publisher for his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, so issues it privately

1893 The Independent Labour Party, later changing its name to the Labour Party, is founded in Britain by the trade unionist Keir Hardie

1893 France claims the Ivory Coast (or Côte d'Ivoire) in west Africa as a French colony

1893 In Falstaff Giuseppe Verdi writes his last opera, and his only comedy since the early days of his career.

1893 De Lesseps, on trial for his management of the Panama Canal company, is sentenced to five years in prison

1893 Giacomo Puccini has his first success when his opera Manon Lescaut opens in Turin

1893 An aluminium statue of Eros, by English sculptor Alfred Gilbert, is unveiled in

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Piccadilly Circus

1892 The French chef Auguste Escoffier creates and names a dessert in honour of the Australian soprano Nellie Melba

1892 Constantine Cavafy begins a 30-year career as a civil servant in Alexandria's Irrigation Service

1892 Mr Pooter is the suburban anti-hero of the The Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith

1892 Colonel Gostling-Murray dies and Whitton Park is put up for sale.

1892 , with choreography by Lev Ivanov to music by Tchaikovsky, has its premiere in St Petersburg

1892 In a sensational trial in Massachusetts, Lizzie Borden is acquitted of the charge of killing her father and stepmother with an

1892 Former president Grover Cleveland defeats incumbent president Benjamin Harrison, becoming the only US president to serve non-consecutive terms

1892 The vicar, the Reverend Richard Tahourdin, moves into Dial House.

1892 Dvorák takes a job in New York as director of the National Conservatory, returning to Prague in 1895

1892 Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck publishes his play Pelléas et Mélisande

1892 Pudge Heffelfinger becomes the first football pro when the Allegheny Athletic Association pay him $500 to play a game in their team

1892 The Falkland Islands, by now occupied by some 2000 settlers, become a British colony

1892 The closing of the Homestead Steel Works near Pittsburgh in a dispute with unions leads to massive confrontation and violence

1892 Gladstone, becoming prime minister for the fourth time, is described by the queen as 'an old, wild and incomprehensible man of eighty two and a half'

1892 Leaves of Grass, still growing, is published in its ninth edition in the year of Walt Whitman's death

1892 Keir Hardie wins the London seat of West Ham, becoming the first Labour member of the House of Commons

1892 Bernard Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses, deals with the serious social problem

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of slum landlords

1892 W.B. Yeats publishes a short play The Countess Cathleen, his first contribution to Irish poetic drama

1892 The French establish a protectorate in part of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey in west Africa

1892 W.B. Yeats founds the National Literary Society in Dublin, with Douglas Hyde as its first president

1892 San Francisco businessmen found an organization to protect nature, the Sierra Club of California, a powerful environmental pressure group

1892 The Ohio Supreme Court rules that monopolistic practices by Rockefeller's oil company are illegal

1892 Oscar Wilde's comedy Lady Windermere's Fan is a great success with audiences in London's St. James Theatre

1892 Frederick Lugard's Maxim machine gun settles a Protestant-Catholic clash in Kampala, the capital of Buganda

1892 Ellis Island in New York Bay opens as the point of reception for arriving immigrants

1891 French artist Paul Gauguin travels to Tahiti and stays in the Pacific islands for most of the rest of his life

1891 Thomas Hardy publishes his novel Tess of the Durbervilles, with a dramatic finale at

1891 Oscar Wilde publishes his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the ever- youthful hero's portrait grows old and ugly

1891 German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal achieves the first of many guided flights in a glider, from a hill near Potsdam

1891 Herman Melville dies in obscurity in New York, with an unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd (not printed till 1924)

1891 A Gaelic pressure group, the Highland Association, is founded to preserve the indigenous poetry and music of Scotland

1891 June 15 Sir Richard Burton is buried in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen in Mortlake, in a mausoleum resembling an Arab tent, designed by his wife

1891 Britain cedes the tiny island of Heligoland to Germany in return for vast areas of Africa

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1891 Civil war breaks out in Chile between supporters of a liberal president and a hostile congress

1891 Canadian athlete James Naismith, at a YMCA college in Springfield, Massachusetts, invents basketball as an indoor winter game

1891 A new Populist Party, dedicated to democracy and welfare, begins a brief career of considerable political influence in the USA

1891 Work begins in the Urals and at Vladivostock, laying track which will eventually join up as the Trans-Siberian railway

1891 Rhodes wins the right to adminster the region from the Zambezi up to Lake Tanganyika, forming present-day Zambia

1891 Germany takes direct control of German East Africa as a protectorate

1890 9-year-old Daisy Ashford imagines an adult romance and high society in The Young Visiters

1890 Scottish anthropologist James Frazer publishes The Golden Bough, a massive compilation of contemporary knowledge about ritual and religious custom

1890 Dial House is extensively restored and altered and the present sundial is installed.

1890 Hundreds of Sioux Indians are killed by US troops in a massacre at Wounded Knee Creek

1890 The world's first electric underground railway passes under the Thames, linking the and Stockwell

1890 October 20 The explorer and Arabist Richard Burton dies in the British consulate in Trieste

1890 Henrik Ibsen publishes his play Hedda Gabler, with its powerfully manipulative central character, a year before it is first produced (in Germany)

1890 Poems is the first of six collections of Emily Dickinson's poetry, found among her papers on her death and published posthumously

1890 Zanzibar, under its Arab sultan, is declared a British protectorate

1890 The Manitoba Schools Question reflects the first major clash in independent Canada between French and British interests

1890 The Sherman Antitrust Act begins a strong US tradition of protecting the free market

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1890 Cecil Rhodes sends colonists to settle the newly won colony of Rhodesia

1890 The new young German emperor, Wilhelm II, dismisses the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck

1890 In How the Other Half Lives David Riis alerts middle-class New Yorkers to the appalling slum conditions in lower Manhattan

1890 A vast cantilever bridge, spanning a mile of water, carries the railway across the Firth of Forth in Scotland

1890 Sleeping Beauty, with choreography by Petipa to music by Tchaikovsky, has its premiere in St Petersburg

1889 The Fabian Society publishes Essays in Socialisman influential volume of essays edited by Bernard Shaw

1889 Elizabeth Twining dies and leaves Dial House to the parish for use as a vicarage.

1889 Charles Steward Parnell is cited as co-respondent in a divorce case brought against Kitty O'Shea

1889 In the treaty of Uccialli, Menelik II cedes the Ethiopian province of Eritrea to Italy

1889 Austrian composer Gustav Mahler conducts the premiere in Budapest of his first symphony, described as a 'symphonic poem'

1889 The US industrialist Andrew Carnegie argues in The Gospel of Wealth that 'the man who dies rich dies disgraced'

1889 A coup removes emperor Pedro II from his throne in Brazil, putting in his place a military dictatorship

1889 English musicologist George Grove completes publication of his four-volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians

1889 The Phillips family sells the Mortlake brewery to Watney’s

1889 The first conference of American nations, in Washington, D.C., launches the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics (later called the Pan-American Union)

1889 The French Panama Canal company goes into liquidation with work still in progress

1889 France and Britain agree colonial boundaries for Senegal and Gambia in west Africa

1889 US reformer Jane Addams sets up Hull House as a neighbourhood social centre in a deprived area of Chicago

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1889 The tone poem Don Juan, by the 25-year-old Richard Strauss, has a passionately mixed response at its premiere in Weimar

1889 A collapsing dam sends 40 feet of water through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing more than 2000 people

1889 The Second International is established by the Socialist parties of ten nations, meeting at a congress in Paris

1889 Vincent van Gogh enters a psychiatric asylum in St Rémy as a voluntary patient

1889 23-year-old Irish author William Butler Yeats publishes his first volume of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin

1889 Menelik II is crowned emperor in Ethiopia, bringing the crown back to the Solomon dynasty

1889 The first Land Run into Oklahoma has settlers galloping in from noon to claim territory previously reserved for American Indians

1889 Adolf Hitler is born in Braunau am Inn, in Austria, the son of Alois and Klara

1889 Cecil Rhodes forms the British South Africa Company to push British commerce and imperial control further north

1888 An undetected murderer, slitting the throats of seven London prostitutes, becomes known by the public as Jack the Ripper

1888 Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison wins the US presidential election, defeating the incumbent president Grover Cleveland

1888 An American Indian visionary, Wovoka, launches a new religion that will bring the dead back to life, calling it the Ghost Dance

1888 The Imperial British East Africa Company is given a charter to adminster Kenya and Uganda

1888 The Ndebele chieftain, Lobengula, grants Rhodes mining rights in what is now Zimbabwe

1888 William Lever builds Port Sunlight as a model village for workers in his Sunlight Soap factory

1888 The emperor Pedro II frees all the remaining slaves in Brazil without compensating their owners

1888 Vincent van Gogh invites Paul Gauguin to come and paint with him at Arles, in the

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south of France

1887 The Australian soprano Nellie Melba makes her operatic debut as Gilda in Rigoletto in Brussels

1887 Anne Sullivan works with the deaf and blind 7-year-old Helen Keller, in a relationship that will last nearly half a century

1887 The Dawes Severalty Act deprives American Indians of their tribal lands, giving each instead an allotment of up to 160 acres

1887 France brings Cambodia and Vietnam into a federation of protectorates under the title French Indochina

1887 January blizzard and summer drought bring to an end ten years of agricultural boom in the US midwest, prompting a new slogan – 'In Kansas we busted'

1887 Eadweard Muybridge publishes Animal Locomotion, a folio volume containing 781 pages of photographs

1887 The US Congress passes the Interstate Commerce Act, an early attempt to avoid the excesses of unrestrained capitalism

1887 A gathering of leaders from the British empire holds a colonial conference in London to coincide with Queen Victoria's jubilee

1887 The imperial government in China formally acknowledges Portuguese territorial rights in Macao

1887 Queen Victoria's golden jubilee brings her back into the public's affection

1887 Lenin's elder brother Alexander, while still a student, is executed for his part in a plot to assassinate the tsar, Alexander III

1887 A chancel is added at the east end of St Mary's Church to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queeen Victoria

1887 To put an end to the Boer republic in Zululand, the British annexe the Zulu kingdom

1887 A German physiologist, Adolf Fick, grinds a pair of lenses to fit snugly in contact with a patient's eyeballs

1887 Giuseppe Verdi's opera Otello has its premeiere at La Scala in Milan

1887 Alexander Borodin dies without finishing his opera Prince Igor (completed later by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov)

1887 Sherlock Holmes features in Conan Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet

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1886 Those in Britain's Liberal party opposing Home Rule for Ireland become a separate group under the name of Unionists

1886 Joseph Conrad becomes naturalized as a British subject and continues his career at sea in the far East

1886 Thomas Hardy publishes his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with the future mayor, Michael Henchard selling his wife and child at a fair

1886 German engineer Gottlied Wilhelm Daimler builds the first successful 4-wheel vehicle with an internal combustion engine

1886 The German and British agreement in east Africa creates the present-day boundary between Tanzania and Kenya

1886 Germany and Britain define neighbouring spheres of interest in east Africa

1886 The Home Rule campaign for Ireland prompts a Scottish Home Rule Association to fight in a related cause

1886 The Crofters' Holdings Act provides security of tenure and other safeguards for Highland crofters in Scotland

1886 The split in the Liberal party over Home Rule results in a defeat for Gladstone and the return of Lord Salisbury as Britain's prime minister

1886 The American Federation of Labor, with Samuel Gompers as its first president, is formed as an umbrella organization to represent all unions

1886 Robert Louis Stevenson introduces a dual personality in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

1886 The Statue of Liberty, after crossing the Atlantic, is erected on Bedloe's island in the approach to New York harbour

1886 In the Haymarket Affair a demonstration in Chicago against results in deaths and subsequent executions

1886 US author Frances Hodgson Burnett publishes Little Lord Fauntleroy, featuring an aristocratic child in a velvet suit

1886 Gladstone's bill promising Home Rule for Ireland splits the Liberal party in Britain's House of Commons

1886 Addis Ababa is founded, to become subsequently the capital of Ethiopia

1886 Dutch painter Vincent Willem van Gogh moves from Antwerp to Paris

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1886 Gladstone becomes Britain's prime minister again, after joining forces with the Irish Nationalists to defeat Lord Salisbury's government

1885 French painter Georges Seurat develops the dotted style of impressionism that becomes known as Pointillism

1885 Leaving his family in Copenhagen, French artist Paul Gauguin returns to Paris to paint full-time

1885 The American portrait-painter John Singer Sargent makes London his home and begins an immensely successful career

1885 Louis Pasteur uses rabies inoculation to save the life of 9-year-old Joseph Meister, bitten by a rabid dog

1885 German warships arrive in Zanzibar harbour to persuade the sultan to cede territory to the Kaiser, William I

1885 The Statue of Liberty, by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, is assembled in Paris before being shipped across the Atlantic

1885 The name Coca-Cola is registered by John S. Pemberton in America for a drink of cocaine, cola nuts and citrus juices

1885 Gladstone resigns as British prime minister, after a defeat on the budget, and is followed by a minority government headed by Conservative leader Lord Salisbury

1885 A secret revolutionary group (Union and Progress, later known as the Young Turks) is formed in Salonika in the Ottoman empire

1885 Italian troops occupy Eritrea, a province of Ethiopia

1885 Bismarck pioneers in Germany state welfare policies such as sickness benefits and old-age pensions

1885 Explorer and orientalist Richard Burton begins publication of his multi-volume translation from the Arabic of The Arabian Nights

1885 Britain annexes Bechuanaland as a protectorate, to secure the route north from the Cape into central Africa

1885 Bismarck grants Karl Peters a charter to rule a German protectorate in east Africa

1885 German engineer Karl Friedrich Benz builds the Tri-Star, a three-wheeled vehicle with an internal combustion that is considered the first commercial automobile

1885 In his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham US author William Dean Howells follows the

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fortunes of a self-made man in Boston

1884 The theatre, still known affectionately in Richmond as Kean's, falls on hard times and is pulled down

1884 Oxford University Press publishes the A volume of its New English Dictionary, which will take 37 years to reach Z

1884 Botha and his Boer followers are rewarded by Dinizulu with a large tract of land, in which they establish their own Boer republic

1884 Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland wins the US presidental election, defeating Republican James G. Blaine

1884 Spain begins to colonize the Western Sahara, subsequently known as the Spanish Sahara

1884 Bismarck invites the European powers to a West Africa Conference in Berlin

1884 US-born British inventor Hiram Maxim demonstrates the first prototype of his machine gun, using the recoil force to eject the spent cartridge and insert a new one

1884 British general Garnet Wolseley sails from London on a mission to rescue Gordon, trapped by the Mahdi in Khartoum

1884 Costa Rica grants a 99-year lease on 800,000 acres to Minor Keith, the American founder of the United Fruit Company

1884 Huck Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer continue their exploits on the Mississippi in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1884 German mathematician Gottlob Frege publishes Grundlagen der Arithmetik ('Foundations of Arithmetic'), linking mathematics and logic

1884 US entrepreneur James 'Buck' Duke wins exclusive rights in a machine that can manufacture 100,000 cigarettes a day

1884 Karl Peters hurries round east Africa persuading chiefs to accept the German emperor as their protector

1884 Verlaine publishes Les Poètes maudits, short studies of various 'cursed poets' – including Rimbaud

1884 The War of the Pacific brings Chile new mineral wealth at the expense of Bolivia and Peru

1884 Barn Elms becomes the home of the Ranelagh Club and is soon famous for its polo matches

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1884 Dinizulu, son of Cetshwayo, employs Boer mercenaries led by Louis Botha to drive his father's enemy, Zibhebhu, from the Zulu kingdom

1884 Gustav Nachtigal, moving on to Cameroon, annexes this region too for the new German empire

1884 The Gaelic Athletic Association is founded in Ireland to promote indigenous games such as hurling

1884 Gustav Nachtigal arrives in Togo and persuades local chiefs to accept the protection of the German emperor

1884 The newly founded Fabian Society publishes Manifesto by George Bernard Shaw

1884 Greenwich becomes accepted internationally as the prime meridian, or 0° longitude

1884 A new Reform Act in Britain further reduces the financial threshold for voters in Britain, in effect extending the franchise to male workers in rural areas

1884 English socialists, including Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, found the Fabian Society as part of a long-term political strategy

1884 The Boer republic in the Transvaal regains its independence from Britain

1884 Bismarck launches the colonial scramble for Africa by suddenly annexing three territories for Germany (Togo, Cameroon and Angria Pequena)

1884 General Gordon marches south to protect Khartoum from the advancing forces of the Mahdi

1884 The British empire is first described as a 'Commonwealth of Nations', by Lord Rosebery speaking in Australia

1884 Cetshwayo dies, after being expelled from his kingdom in an uprising led by Zibhebhu and supported by Boer mercenaries

1883 Antoni Gaudí begins a life-long commitment to the building of a modern cathedral in Barcelona, El Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia

1883 French artist Claude Monet moves to Giverny, where he creates and paints a famous lily pond

1883-1884 After the gallery is built in Kew Gardens at her expense, Marianne North continues to travel and paint, eventually filling it with 832 pictures. She dies in 1890.

1883 William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, celebrates the world of the cowboy in his immensely successful Wild West Show

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1883 Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure story, Treasure Island, features Long John Silver and Ben Gunn

1883 Eruption of the volcano on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa sends six cubic miles of debris into the atmosphere and causes a huge tsunami

1883 Mohammed Ahmed, proclaiming himself the Mahdi, defeats three Egyptian armies in the Sudan

1883 Mark Twain's autobiographical book Life on the Mississippi details his own personal involvement with the great river

1883 In Thus Spake Zarathustra Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche envisages the Übermensch ('superman') enhancing human existence

1883 French marines land at Tamatave in Madagascar to protect French interests and assert French control

1883 English polymath Francis Galton publishes Inquiries in Human Faculty, developing the theme of eugenics and coining the term

1883 Lord Napier heads a Royal Commission to look into the condition of crofters after the Battle of the Braes in Skye

1883 Brooklyn Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world, is opened between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan

1883 Joseph Pulitzer buys the New York World and builds circulation with sensational news and campaigns

1883 The Supreme Court declares illegal the 1875 Civil Rights Act against segregation, thus enabling the southern states to pass racist laws

1883 Harvard graduates J.A. Mitchell and E.S. Martin establish Life magazine as a new satirical weekly

1883 The British reinstate Cetshwayo as Zulu king, but over a much smaller territory

1883 Following Lady Waldegrave's death in 1879, the Strawberry Hill estate is sold first to an American hotel company and then on, in 1883 to Baron de Stern.

1882 Orleans House is bought by the Cunard family who are the last private owners.

1882 Jumbo, the 'world's largest elephant', becomes the star attraction of Barnum and Bailey's touring circus

1882 When Australia win the second Test match, in London, the Sporting Times declares

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that they will take home with them 'the ashes of English cricket'

1882+ Ulises Heureaux becomes dictator of the Dominican Republic and retains power until assassinated in 1899

1882 Anti-western riots in Alexandria result in many deaths and provoke a British invasion

1882 Italy, previously non-aligned, signs a Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria- Hungary

1882 The first settlements of European Jews, returning to the promised land, are established in Palestine

1882 Irish chief secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and a colleague are assassinated in Phoenix Park in Dublin

1882 Stanley establishes a foothold for Leopold II on the southern bank of the Congo, at a site which he names Leopoldville (now Kinshasa)

1882 Congress passes a Chinese Exclusion Act, in the USA's first retreat from the policy of welcoming all immigrants

1882 Jesse James allows into his home a new gang member, working secretly for the police, who shoots him in the back

1882 German bacteriologist Robert Koch announces his discovery of the bacillus that causes tuberculosis

1882 Eadweard Muybridge projects slow-motion images of a trotting horse as a demonstration at London's Royal Institution

1881 The Chicago architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan set up a partnership

1881 The Aesthetic Movement and 'art for art's sake', attitudes personified above all by Whistler and Wilde, are widely mocked and satirized in Britain

1881 On the death of James Garfield, he is succeeded as US president by vice-president Chester A. Arthur

1881 Booker T. Washington, freed at the end of the Civil War, heads a college in the south, in Tuskegee, Alabama, to educate former slaves

1881 Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady studies an American girl, Isabel Archer, in the unfamiliar context of Europe

1881 Stanley finds Brazza's French tricolor already flying on the north bank of the Congo, on the site of what later becomes Brazzaville

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1881 US president James Garfield is shot by Charles J. Guiteau at a Washington railway station, and dies two months later

1881 P.T. Barnum and his main rival James Bailey merge their enterprises to form America's leading circus

1881 The British withdraw from Afghanistan, having achieved nothing in the Second Anglo-Afghan War

1881 London's new Savoy Theatre is the first public building in the world to be lit throughout by electricity

1881 Joel Chandler Harris publishes Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the first of many Uncle Remus volumes

1881 The Tynwald in the Isle of Man becomes the first parliament to give women the vote

1881 In Washington Square Henry James tells the sad story of heiress Catherine Sloper

1881 France invades Tunisia from Algeria, and in the Treaty of Bardo forces the bey of Tunis to accept the status of a French protectorate

1881 Russia's reforming tsar, Alexander II, is killed by hand-made grenades thrown at his carriage in St Petersburg

1881 The first pogroms, or officially sanctioned attacks on Jews and their property, take place in Russia

1881 The Boers inflict a convincing defeat on a British army at Majuba, in the Transvaal

1881 Boston lawyer Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr publishes a legal study that becomes a classic text, The Common Law

1880 December George Eliot dies, of a long-standing kidney disease, and a week later is buried beside G.H. Lewes in Highgate cemetery

1880 December George Eliot and her new husband move into a splendid new house in Cheyne Walk, beside the Thames in London

1880 Republican candidate James Abram Garfield defeats Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock in the US presidential election

1880 US author Lew Wallace publishes a historical novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

1880 Johannes Brahms' Academic Festival Overture is performed first at Breslau university, which has conferred on him an honorary Ph.D.

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1880 Dostoevsky publishes his novel The Brothers Karamazov, featuring the four sons of the depraved Feodor Pavlovich Karamazov

1880 Russian composer Alexander Borodin writes In the Steppes of Central Asia as part of the silver jubilee celebrations for Alexander II

1880 French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza forestalls Stanley in opening up the Congo, reaching Stanley Pool ahead of him

1880 Gustave Flaubert dies, with his novel Bouvard et Pécuchet incomplete

1880 On their honeymoon in Venice, George Eliot's husband develops depression and throws himself, or falls, from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal

1880 For the second time Gladstone replaces Disraeli as Britain's prime minister, following a Liberal election victory over the Conservatives

1880 May 6 George Eliot marries John Walter Cross, 20 years her junior, and begins calling herself Mary Ann Cross

1880 Buenos Aires is finally accepted as the permanent capital city of Argentina

1879 Henry James's story Daisy Miller, about an American girl abroad, brings him a new readership

1879 An entire train, full of passengers, falls into the river Tay in Scotland when a bridge collapses in a winter gale

1879 The future Cassel Hospital buildings are occupied by West Heath School for young ladies – some of its classes being attended by Princess May (the future Queen Mary), while living at White Lodge, Richmond Park

1879 Thomas Edison develops a long-lasting carbon filament light bulb (traditionally 40 hours) and is able to light his Menlo Park laboratory with 30 bulbs

1879 Cetshwayo is captured by the British and is exiled to 'Cape Town

1879 Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House signals a new direction in drama in its frank treatment of tensions within a marriage

1879 Mary Baker Eddy and others found the first Church of Christ, Scientist, in Lynn, Massachusetts

1879 The British destruction of Cetshwayo's kraal at Ulundi ends the Zulu War

1879 George Goldie and British traders on the Niger form the United African Company (later the Royal Niger Company) to consolidate their interests

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1879 US author Joel Chandler Harris introduces Uncle Remus in a story in the Constitution

1879 Marianne North commissions her friend James Fergusson to design a gallery to be built in Kew Gardens for the pictures of flowers and plants that she has painted on extensive travels around the world.

1879 English physicist Joseph Swan receives a patent for bromide paper, which becomes the standard material for printing photographs

1879 A congress in Paris, with Ferdinand de Lesseps as president, decides to construct a canal from coast to coast in Panama

1879 The ancient Irish game of hurling is formalized by the newly founded Irish Hurling Union

1879 The young daughter of an amateur archaeologist discovers the first known example of prehistoric art, in a cave at Altamira in Spain

1879 Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin, based on Pushkin's poem, has its premiere in Moscow

1879 George Eliot develops an emotional bond with her investment banker, John Walter Cross, whose beloved mother died a week after Lewes

1879 Immediately after Isandhlwana a tiny British garrison at Rorke's Drift fights off an overwhelming Zulu attack

1879 Zulu tribesmen surprise and annihilate a British army encamped near Isandhlwana

1879 The British find a pretext to march into the territory ruled by Cetshwayo, thus launching the Zulu War

1878 21-year-old Joseph Conrad, a Polish subject, goes to sea with the British merchant navy

1878 English physicist Joseph Swan demonstrates a practical electric light bulb, using an incandescent carbon filament in a vacuum

1878 November 30 George Eliot is devastated by the death from cancer of G.H. Lewes, her partner of 25 years

1878 Three British armies invade Afghanistan, beginning the second Anglo-Afghan War

1878 A war of liberation against Turkey wins full independence for Serbia

1878 The Ten Years' War ends in Cuba, with Spain promising extensive reforms including the abolition of slavery

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1878 Czech composer Anton Dvorák writes his first set of Slavonic Dances, originally as piano duets

1878 Stanley agrees to work for Leopold II in opening up the Congo river to commerce

1878 English-born US photographer Eadweard Muybridge publishes closely linked photographs revealing how a horse goes through its paces

1878 Romania achieves a new status as an internationally recognized independent nation

1878 A disagreement between families on the West Virginia and Kentucky border flares up and eventually claims a dozen lives

1878 William Crookes develops a special tube, now known as the Crookes tube, for the study of cathode rays

1878 A congress in Berlin agrees that Austria may administer the Turkish province of Bosnia-Herzegovina

1878 On a wave of jingoism sends six British ironclads, in support of Turkey, to confront the Russians near Istanbul

1877 John Astley buys Orleans House and converts it to a sports and social club which is unsuccessful.

1877 The human voice is recorded for the first time when Thomas Edison recites 'Mary had a little lamb' into his newly patented phonograph

1877 A strike against wage cuts by Baltimore railway workers spreads until it becomes almost a national strike

1877 Stanley completes his exploration of the Congo, reaching the Atlantic coast at Boma after a three-year journey

1877 The first lawn-tennis championships are organized by the All-England Croquet Club at Wimbledon

1877 The Nez Percé Indians are led by Chief Joseph in a war against the US army

1877 Cattle-rustler William H. Bonney becomes known as in his brief and murderous career of crime in New Mexico

1877 The ballet Swan Lake, with choreography by Julius Wenzel Reisinger to music by Tchaikovsky, has its premiere at the Bolshoi in Moscow

1877 Puck is launched in the USA as a an illustrated weekly magazine of political satire

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1877 Britain annexes the Boer republic in the Transvaal

1877 The Compromise of 1877 settles the disputed US presidential election but ends active Republican commitment to the cause of Reconstruction in the southern states

1877 Whistler finds romance in Battersea Bridge

1877 The first Test match is played in Melbourne between English and Australian cricket teams, with victory going to Australia

1876 Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes defeats Democrat Samuel J. Tilden in a US presidential election of which the result is strongly disputed

1876 Johannes Brahms' first symphony has its premiere in Karlsruhe

1876 Leopold II hosts a conference in Brussels on the subject of opening up the African continent

1876 Lord and Lady Russell take their orphaned grandsons Frank and Bertrand (later a leading philosopher) to live in Pembroke Lodge

1876 Lewis Carroll publishes The Hunting of the Snark, a poem about a voyage in search of an elusive mythical creature

1876 After a failed bank hold-up in Northfield, Minnesota, the whole of the James gang is killed except Jesse and his brother Frank

1876 English cricketer W.G. Grace scores a record 344 runs, playing for the Marylebone Cricket Club against Kent at Canterbury

1876 George Eliot publishes Daniel Deronda, contrasting Jewish idealism with upper- class English materialism

1876 Richard Wagner's sequence of four , The Ring of the Nibelungen, has its first complete performance at Bayreuth

1876 Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky begins an intense correspondence with a wealthy patron, Nadezhda von Meck

1876 Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom and his friends find excitement in a small town on the Mississippi

1876 English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins develops a new verse form that he calls 'sprung rhythm'

1876 Susan B. Anthony presents a Woman's Declaration of Rights at the US centennial

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Fourth of July celebrations

1876 Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates his new invention, the telephone, at the US Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia

1876 Scottish missionaries establish Blantyre (named after Livingstone's birthplace) as a centre from which to fight slavery

1876 The US inventor Thomas Edison opens an experimental laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, calling it his 'invention factory'

1876 In 21 years Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass has grown from 12 poems to the two volumes of the sixth edition, published in the USA's centenary year

1876 India becomes the 'jewel in the crown' of Queen Victoria when Benjamin Disraeli secures for her the title Empress of India

1876 Henry James moves to London, which remains his home for the next 22 years

1876 Stanley passes Nyangwe on the Lualaba, the furthest point down the Congo river system reached by Livingstone

1876 William Gladstone's pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors, protesting at massacre by the Turks, sells 200,000 copies within a month

1876 The chaotic government finances of Egypt are placed under joint French and British control

1876 New pews are installed in St John's and the second pulpit is removed

1876 George Custer leads a US cavalry attack on the Sioux at the Little Bighorn river, with disastrous results

1876 Turkish irregular soldiers, the ferocious bashibazouks, massacre some 15,000 Bulgarian civilians

1876 Alexander Graham Bell makes the first practical use of his telephone, summoning his assistant from another room with the words 'Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.'

1876 York House is bought by Sir Mounstuart Grant Duff MP, later Governor of Madras

1876 Proposals are put forward for a new bridge near the Tower

1875 Henry James's early novel Roderick Hudson is serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and is published in book form in 1876

1875 An outbreak of measles in Fiji, brought to the islands by British visitors, kills a

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quarter of the population

1875 An agreement is signed between France and Britain to cooperate in the construction of a tunnel beneath the Channel

1875 Slavery is finally made illegal in the Portuguese empire

1875 US artist Thomas Eakins' depiction of the gruesome aspect of surgery, in his portrait of Dr Gross, offends many viewers

1875 Mary Baker Eddy expounds her beliefs in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, later considered the textbook of Christian Science

1875 Andrew Carnegie's new steel mill near Pittsburgh prospers through automation, new technology and non-union labour

1875 Benjamin Disraeli buys for Britain a controlling share in the Suez Canal, with money borrowed from Lionel Nathan de

1875 Nikolai Przewalski discovers in western Mongolia a surviving example of the wild breed from which the horse was domesticated

1875 Congress passes a Civil Rights Act outlawing segration in the USA on public transport and in hotels and restaurants

1875 Madame Blavatsky founds in New York the Theosophical Society, preaching universal brotherhood with a strong dash of mysticism

1875 After spending much time in Europe in recent years, Henry James moves there permanently and settles first in Paris

1875 Leo Tolstoy publishes the first volume of his novel Anna Karenina, in which the heroine develops a fatal love for Count Vronsky

1875 William Crookes invents the radiometer, in which light causes four vanes to rotate in a bulb containing gas at low pressure

1875 Charles Stewart Parnell takes his seat in the House of Commons at Westminster and immediately adds zest to the campaign for Home Rule

1875 Georges Bizet's opera Carmen has its premiere in Paris and meets at first with a lukewarm response

1875 The return to Spain of Isabella's son, as Alfonso XII, offers an end to forty years of royal feuding

1875 Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt has its premiere in Oslo, with incidental music by Edvard Grieg

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1874 English author Thomas Hardy has his first success with his novel Far from the Madding Crowd

1874 Mussorgsky composes Pictures at an Exhibition as a piece for piano in memory of an exhibition by the Russian painter Victor Hartmann

1874 Stanley sets off from Bagamoyo, intending to resume the exploration of central Africa where Livingstone left off

1874 The southern region of present-day Ghana becomes a British colony, to be known as the Gold Coast

1874 Major Walter Wingfield secures a patent for Sphairistike, a game he has developed at his home in Wales, from which lawn tennis evolves

1874 Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli, at the age of 70, begins a 6-year term of office as Britain's prime minister

1874 French critic Louis Leroy uses the term 'impressionism' to ridicule Monet's Impression, Sunrise, and unwittingly names a movement

1874 A group of French artists, including Renoir, Monet and Degas, exhibit their work independently in the Paris studio of the photographer Nadar

1874 Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus has its premiere in Vienna

1874 Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov has its premiere in St Petersburg

1873 French painter Edgar Degas finds inspiration in the onstage and backstage world of ballet dancers

1873 St Nicholas, a monthly magazine of high literary quality for children, is launched in the USA

1873 The North-West Mounted Police are formed, with the specific task of policing the wild Northwest Territories of Canada

1873 Prince Edward Island joins the Canadian confederation, completing the first batch of Canada's provinces

1873 Verlaine is sentenced to two years in prison, at Mons in Belgium, after shooting and wounding Rimbaud in a drunken rage in Brussels

1873 The Joint Committee of the Corporation of London and the Metropolitan Board of Works buy Kew bridge for £53,000 and on the eighth of February tolls are abolished

1873 US shoe salesman and YMCA member Dwight L. Moody launches into a new

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career as a revivalist preacher

1873 San Francisco merchant Levi Strauss receives a patent for denim jeans, soon to be known as Levi's

1873 The British consul in Zanzibar persuades the sultan to end the island's notorious slave trade

1873 The Gilded Age, by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain, provides the familiar name for life in the US towards the end of the nineteenth century

1872 Lewis Carroll publishes Through the Looking Glass, a second story of Alice's adventures

1872 Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud move together to Brussels, and then to London, where they live a dissolute bohemian existence

1872 Cetshwayo becomes king of Zululand, on the death of his father Mpande

1872 Pragmatism emerges as a philosophical approach in meetings of the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts

1872 The Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad cuts through the territory reserved for American Indians, bringing hordes of 'boomers'

1872 The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin splits the International Congress into rival camps at its meeting in the Hague

1872 The US Congress establishes Yellowstone, with its famous geysers, as the world's first national park

1872 The Ballot Act adds to the British electoral system the essential element of secrecy in voting

1871 Whistler begins to paint his Nocturnes, a revolutionary series of night-time images on the river Thames

1871 George Eliot publishes Middlemarch, in which Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage to the pedantic Edward Casaubon

1871 Italian US immigrant Antonio Meucci files a patent in New York for the invention of the telephone

1871 Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, is commissioned for the Cairo opera house, part of the process of Egypt becoming westernized

1871 Stanley, finding Livingstone at Ujiji, greets him with four words which become famous – 'Dr Livingstone, I presume'

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1871 French author Émile Zola publishes The Fortune of the Rougons, the first in a 20- novel series that he calls Les Rougon-Macquart

1871 British Columbia agrees to join the Canadian confederation on the promise of a transcontinental railway

1871 A fire in Chicago destroys a third of the city, to be followed by an extremely rapid and successful period of reconstruction

1871 English actor Henry Irving plays what becomes one of his most famous parts, that of Mathias in the melodrama The Bells

1871 Whistler paints his mother and calls the picture Arrangement in Grey and Black

1871 US president Ulysses S. Grant uses the new Civil Rights Act to suppress the violent Ku Klux Klan in southern states

1871 The Paris communards are overwhelmed in a battle at the Père Lachaise cemetery, which is followed by brutal reprisals

1871 18-year-old English entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes, on a temporary visit to South Africa, arrives in the new diamond town of Kimberley

1871 Rome becomes the capital city of the entire Italian peninsula, for the first time since the Roman empire

1871 An uprising results in the Paris Commune, followed by the siege of the city by French government forces

1871 The Afghan philosopher Jamal al-Din, moving to Cairo, urges drastic and violent measures against western influence

1871 Troops of the new German empire march through Paris in a victory parade at the end of the Franco-Prussian war

1871 The Prussian king, William I, is proclaimed emperor of a united Germany in the palace at Versailles

1871 Civil War veterans in the USA establish the National Rifle Association to promote marksmanship

1871 US anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan inaugurates kinship studies with his massive Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family

1870 As the result of a plebiscite, Rome and the remaining papal states are included in the kingdom of Italy

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1870 Richard Wagner marries Cosima, the daughter of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt

1870 Bret Harte's comic ballad Plain Language from Truthful James acquires a popular alternative title, The Heathen Chinee

1870 The all-round English cricketer W.G. Grace begins a 28-year career as captain of Gloucestershire

1870 A French government of national defence deposes Napoleon III and proclaims the third French republic

1870 Napoleon III is among 83,000 French prisoners captured by the Germans at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian war

1870 Isaac Butt, an Irish MP at Westminster, founds the Home Rule association

1870 French artist Claude Monet, fleeing from the Franco-Prussian War, arrives in London

1870 The Red River rebellion in Winnipeg (1869) prompts the creation of Manitoba as a province of Canada

1870 Adelaide and Darwin are linked across the entire Australian continent by the Overland Telegraph Line

1870 16-year-old Arthur Rimbaud sends some of his poems to Paul Verlaine, already an established poet

1870 With public opinion in France outraged by the Ems telegram, the French government declares war on Prussia

1870 The Turkish sultan finally allows the Christians of Bulgaria to have their own Orthodox patriarch

1870 The Star and Garter hotel is destroyed by fire, then rebuilt to a design of Charles John Phipps

1870 Pope Pius IX, rapidly losing temporal authority, declares a new dogma – that the pope, when speaking from the throne, is infallible on matters of faith or morals

1870 Otto von Bismarck adjusts the Prussian king's telegram from Ems in a way calculated to provoke the French

1870 Coppélia, with choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon to music by Delibes, has its premiere at the Paris Opera

1870 John D. Rockefeller and his partners establish the Standard Oil Company of Ohio

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1869 French part-time painter Henri Rousseau becomes known as Douanier ('customs officer') Rousseau because of his paid employment

1869 Young French artists Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir paint together in the open air at La Grenouillère, developing the Impressionist style

1869 The most famous of the three-masted tea-clippers, the Cutty Sark is launched at Dumbarton for service to and from China

1869 Thousands of distinguished guests assemble at Port Said for the opening of the Suez Canal

1869 British explorer Samuel Baker annexes the southern Sudan, or Equatoria, on behalf of the khedive of Egypt

1869 Das Rheingold, with its premiere in Munich, is the first part of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle to be staged

1869 The proprietor of the New York Herald gives Henry Morton Stanley a very concise commission – 'Find Livingstone'

1869 Britain, France and Italy take joint control of the finances of a bankrupt Tunisia

1869 Extensive acquisition of neighbouring properties gives the Mortlake brewery a huge river frontage, and the success of the enterprise is commemorated in the façade of a new building

1869 The territory of the Hudson's Bay Company is transferred to the new state of Canada

1869 The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads meet at Promontory Summit in Utah, completing the first transcontinental line

1869 British prime minister William Gladstone introduces a bill to disestablish the Anglican church in Ireland

1869 English author Matthew Arnold publishes Culture and Anarchy, an influential collection of essays about contemporary society

1869 Cincinnati, Ohio, fielding the first baseball team in which every member is a hired professional, wins every match of the year

1869 January 1 The first train arrives at Kew Gardens Station, on a line used both by L&SWR and the North London Line

1869 The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (ratified in 1870) makes it illegal to deny the right to vote on racial grounds

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1869 The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (ratified in 1870) makes it illegal to deny the right to vote on racial grounds

1869 Johannes Brahms' German Requiem, setting passages from Luther's translation of the Bible, has its first complete performance in Leipzig

1868-9 Kew Gardens station is built, as a two-storey building in the style of a domestic Victorian villa

1868 Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant wins the US presidential election, as the Republican candidate against Democrat Horatio Seymour

1868 George Custer leads federal troops in the massacre of more than 100 American Indians, on an official reservation beside the Washita river

1868 Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone becomes British prime minister, for the first of four times, and remains in office for six years

1868 An armed uprising against Spanish rule takes place in the town of Lares in Puerto Rico, becoming known as the Grito de Lares ('Cry of Lares')

1868 Dostoevsky publishes The Idiot, a novel about the simple-minded and truthful Prince Myshkin

1868 US author Louisa May Alcott begins serial publication of her book for children, Little Women (in book form 1869)

1868 Richard Wagner's opera The Mastersingers of Nuremberg has its premiere in Munich

1868 An uprising against Spanish rule in Cuba sparks off a Ten Years' War

1868 Executions take place in public for the last time in London, being moved from outside Newgate Gaol to inside the prison

1868 US president Andrew Johnson escapes impeachment (for dismissing his secretary of war) by a single vote

1868 Britain annexes Basutoland (now Lesotho), the kingdom of the Sotho leader Moshoeshoe

1868 Benjamin Disraeli becomes British prime minister for the first time, at the head of a Conservative government, but only for a few months

1867 The first collection of 'Negro Spirituals' is published in book form in the US as Slave Songs of the United States

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1867 Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patents dynamite, making the volatile explosive nitroglycerine safer by combining it with kieselguhr

1867 William Cody earns his nickname Buffalo Bill by killing thousands of the animals to feed construction workers on the Union Pacific Railroad

1867 Modest Mussorgsky composes his orchestral work St John's Night on the Bare Mountain, based on a story by Gogol

1867 The Queensberry rules, named after the Marquess of Queensberry, introduce padded gloves in boxing, and rounds of three minutes

1867 A revival of the Prussian Zollverein, or customs union, includes all the German states except Austria

1867 Oliver Hudson Kelley founds the Grange as a social organization to benefit US farmers

1867 The Canadian nation is called the Dominion of Canada – the first example of 'dominion status'

1867 Four former colonies (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec) unite to form the new nation of Canada with Ottawa as the capital

1867 The invention of barbed wire is patented in the USA by Lucien Smith, designed to fence in cattle but also a protection for the wheat fields of the midwest plains 2

1867 The world's first croquet tournament takes place in Evesham and is won by Walter Jones-Whitmore

1867 The first volume of Das Kapital is completed by Marx in London and is published in Hamburg

1867 French author Paul Verlaine wins a reputation with his first published collection, Poémes saturniens ('Saturnine Poems')

1867 Maximilian, the emperor of Mexico, and two of his generals are shot after being surrounded and captured at Querétaro

1867 Francis Joseph, emperor of Austria, is also crowned king of Hungary – to become ruler of the 'dual monarchy' of Austria-Hungary

1867 The US Congress passes Reconstruction Acts, dividing the defeated South into military districts and insisting on elections by universal male suffrage

1867 The British North America Act, acknowledging the fears of French Catholics in Canada, guarantees the rights of "dissentient schools"

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1867 Secretary of state William Seward negotiates a price of $7.2 million for the purchase of Alaska from Russia, in a deal that some consider 'Seward's Folly'

1867 Britain's new Reform Act extends the franchise to working men in British towns

1866 Elizabeth Twining, who founded St John's Hospital in Oak Lane, Twickenham, occupies Dial House until her death.

1866 A railway bridge brings trains to Cannon Street

1866 Napoleon III withdraws French troops from Mexico, leaving the emperor Maximilian in a dangerous situation

1866 Dostoevsky publishes Crime and Punishment, a novel narrated by Raskolnikov, a St Petersburg student and murderer

1866 The Argentine Rural Society is founded as the exclusive preserve of Argentina's oligarchy

1866 Algernon Swinburne scandalizes Victorian Britain with his first collection, Poems and Ballads

1866 Recovery from serious injury convinces Mary Baker Eddy that sickness and health are spiritually based, and provides her with the impulse to found Christian Science

1866 Austrian rule ends in the Venetian territories, which now join the new kingdom of Italy

1866 US painter Winslow Homer makes his name with the exhibition of a Civil War subject, Prisoners from the Front

1866 The terms of the treaty of Prague, ending the Seven Weeks War, make plain the transfer of German leadership from Austria to Prussia

1866 Russell's government falls, and Lord Derby returns for the third time, but again briefly, as Britain's prime minister

1866 George Eliot publishes Felix Holt the Radical, based on her childhood memories of the period of the great Reform Bill in 1832

1866 Walt Whitman laments the assassinated President Lincoln in his poem 'O Captain! My Captain!', published in Sequel to Drum-Taps

1866 The Prussians achieve the first blitzkrieg in their Seven Weeks' War defeat of the Austrians

1866 Prussia invades its neighbouring German states and launches the Seven Weeks' War

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1866 The Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution (not ratified till 1868) assures equal rights as citizens to all born or naturalized in the USA

1866 A Civil Rights Act is passed by the US Congress, guaranteeing the legal rights of African-Americans

1866 William McCanlis keeps a cricketing diary

1866 A pressure group for penal reform in Britain is named after the great prison reformer John Howard

1865 The last survivor of the Richmond tontine dies, at the age of 91, ending the payment of interest and making the Richmond Bridge free of tolls

1865 The first branch of the Ku Klux Klan is founded at Pulaski, in Tennessee, on Christmas Eve

1865 The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits slavery or any 'involuntary servitude' in the USA

1865 The Plains Indians are threatened by settlers pressing west, building railways and slaughtering buffalo

1865 Palmerston dies in office, and is succeeded as leader of the Liberal government in Britain by his foreign secretary, Earl Russell

1865 Leo Tolstoy publishes the first volume of his epic novel War and Peace, following the lives of several aristocratic families during the

1865 A committee to campaign for women's suffrage is formed in Manchester, the first of many in Britain

1865 The southern states pass new Black Codes, designed to limit the freedom granted to African-Americans by the victorious north

1865 The Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López starts a war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay which eventually kills more than half his population

1865 Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde has its premiere in the Munich court theatre

1865 Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlier

1865 Vice-president Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, becomes president on the death of Republican Abraham Lincoln

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1865 On a visit to a Washington theatre, Lincoln is assassinated in his box by John Wilkes Booth

1865 Samuel Clemens, writing under the pseudonym Mark Twain, has immediate success with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

1865 English surgeon Joseph Lister introduces the era of antiseptic surgery, with the use of carbolic acid in the operating theatre

1865 The third Hampton Court Bridge is built, replacing one on the same line that was pulled down in 1864, made of wrought-iron lattice girders in five spans on cast-iron columns

1865 Lee surrenders to Grant at the Appomattox Court House, and is offered conciliatory terms

1865 A west wing is added to Garrick's Villa by Sylvanus Phillips

1865 Lincoln visits the Confederate capital at Richmond and is greeted by a jubilant crowd of freed slaves

1865 The Confederate government abandons Richmond, and Lee begins a retreat to the west

1865 Gregor Mendel reads a paper to the Natural History Society in Brno describing his discoveries in the field of genetics

1864 William T. Sherman reaches the coast and captures Savannah, after his violently destructive 'march to the sea'

1864 The Hungerford Railway Bridge, also known as the Charing Cross Railway Bridge, brings trains to Charing Cross Station

1864 President Lincoln is re-elected for a second term, thanks largely to recent Union successes on the Civil War battlefields

1864 Dostoevsky publishes Notes from Underground, the bitter memories of a retired civil servant that is often described as the first existentialist novel

1864 William Tecumseh Sherman captures Atlanta, the first important southern city to fall into Union hands

1864 Pope Pius IX includes socialism, civil marriage and secular education among eighty modern errors listed in his Syllabus

1864 Imperial Chinese troops and Gordon's auxiliaries take Nanjing, the rebel capital, finally bringing to an end the Taiping rebellion

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1864 The Federal government confiscates the Arlington estate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and turns it into a war cemetery

1864 The first Geneva Convention establishes standards for the treatment of the wounded in war

1864 Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell presents to the Royal Society his discoveries in the field of electromagnetics, now known collectively as Maxwell's Equations

1864 The First International is established in London, with Karl Marx soon emerging as the association's leader

1864 The French arrange for the coronation of the Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico

1864 Grant moves south in a hard-fought campaign to pin down Lee's Confederate army at Petersburg, near Richmond

1864 The island of Corfu is ceded by Britain to the kingdom of Greece

1864 Prussia and Austria combine forces to seize Schleswig-Holstein, but soon fall out

1864 Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman become Lincoln's two leading generals in the final thrust of the Civil War

1864 York House is acquired on behalf of the Comte de Paris, exiled Orleanist claimant to the French throne.

1864 The Marylebone Cricket Club, arbiter of cricket, finally rules that overarm bowling is legitimate

1863 48-year-old Julia Margaret Cameron is given a camera by her daughter, in the Isle of Wight, and decides to concentrate on portraits

1863 The Metropolitan Railway, the world's first to go underground, opens in London using steam trains between Paddington and Farringdon Street

1863 President Lincoln, in honouring the Union dead at Gettysburg, captures in three minutes the essence of American democracy

1863 November George Eliot, now prosperous, moves with G.H. Lewes into the Priory, a splendid house near Regent's Park

1863 St Mary's hospital opens in Rochester, Minnesota, soon to be known as the Mayo Clinic from the three Drs Mayo who run it

1863 The Seventh-day Adventists become an organized church, with a first General

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Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan

1863 Henri Dunant and others establish the Red Cross in Geneva, as a direct result of the battlefield casualties Dunant has witnessed at Solferino in 1859

1863 English author Charles Kingsley publishes an improving fantasy for young children, The Water-Babies

1863 France establishes a protectorate over Cambodia

1863 After more than a century of growing citrus fruits and other plants, the Orangery is turned into a museum.

1863 Four days of riots in New York greet Lincoln's new conscription or draft laws, with exemptions for the rich

1863 After a six-week siege the city of Vicksburg surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant, bringing the entire Mississippi under Union control

1863 The three-day Battle of Gettysburg, inconclusive but more damaging to the Confederates, brings casualties on both sides of more than 50,000

1863 The French capture Mexico City and President Juarez flees to the north

1863 Mobs of women destroy shops in Richmond, Virginia, in protest at food prices inflated by the war

1863 British architect George Gilbert Scott designs a memorial for Prince Albert in Kensington Gardens

1863 Samuel Clemens uses the pseudonym Mark Twain for the first time on an article in Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise

1863 British officer Charles Gordon leads untrained auxiliaries against the Taiping rebels in China, becoming known as Chinese Gordon

1863 It is discovered in the US that wood pulp can be used to make paper, and the Boston Weekly Journal is the first to use the new substance

1862 The bones of Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills are brought back to Melbourne after the heroic failure of their attempt to cross Australia

1862 Unpublished American poet Emily Dickinson writes more than 300 poems within the year

1862 The future Cassel Hospital estate, now with a single mansion, is leased for nine years to HRH Robert Philippe, Duc de Chartres, exiled from France along with his grandfather, King Louis Philippe

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1862 Dostoevsky publishes Notes from the House of the Dead, a semi-autobiographical novel about life in a Siberian labour camp

1862 Lincoln declares in his Emancipation Proclamation that all slaves in any state opposing the Union government 'are and henceforward shall be free'

1862 The Federal victory at Antietam comes at a cost of more than 22,000 casualties in a single day

1862 Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee defeat a Union army in the second battle of Bull Run or Manassas

1862 Otto von Bismarck declares Blut und Eisen (blood and iron) to be the only policy by which Prussia can become strong

1862 The Homestead Act grants 160 acres in the west of the USA to any family farming them for five years

1862 John McDouall Stuart reaches the north coast of Australia at Van Diemen's Gulf seven months after setting off from Adelaide

1862 Swiss humanitarian Henri Dunant publishes A Memory of Solferino, proposing an international agency to cope with the battlefield casualties he has witnessed

1862 November Under the title Romola, George Eliot's story of Savonarola in Florence begins publication (completed in August 1863)

1862 Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell, on a boat trip, a story about her own adventures in Wonderland

1862 George B. McClellan brings a Union army within a few miles of Richmond, but withdraws after the Seven Days Battle against Robert E. Lee

1862 Speke and Grant find the Ripon Falls, over which the headwater of the Nile flows from Lake Tanganyika

1862 Richard Burton, visiting Dahomey, provides reports of the kingdom's celebrated Amazons preparing for war

1862 Victor Hugo publishes his novel Les Misérables, an immensely complex story about the adventures of ex-convict Jean Valjean

1862 In a surprise raid, Union forces sail up the Mississippi estuary to capture New Orleans

1862 Louis Pasteur uses heat to destroy the micro-organisms in liquid food, in the process that becomes known as pasteurization

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1862 A two-day engagement at Shiloh is the first Civil War battle to bring massive casualties, with more than 23,000 dead, wounded or missing

1862 Julia Ward Howe publishes The Battle Hymn of the Republic, inspired by a visit to Union troops in the American Civil War

1862 The Monitor and the Merrimack fight all morning off the Virginia coast, in history's first clash between ironclad ships

1862 A joint French, Spanish and British force lands in Mexico and captures Veracruz, ostensibly to collect the interest on European debts

1861 Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas

1861 Hungarian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis publishes his discovery that deaths from puerperal fever can be dramatically reduced by a strict hand-washing routine

1861 A suspension bridge is completed at Lambeth

1861 Cotton's Wharf burns

1861 Prince Albert dies of typhoid, plunging Victoria into forty years of widowhood and deep mourning

1861 George Eliot is offered £10,000 to write a novel about Savonarola as a 12-part serial in the new Cornhill Magazine

1861 Longfellow's narrative poem Paul Revere's Ride dramatizes a turning point at the start of the American Revolution

1861 At Pavón the provincial troops of Buenos Aires defeat the Argentinian national army, emphatically demonstrating the power of their city

1861 The first battle of the American Civil War, fought near Manassas and the Bull Run Creek, is a clear Confederate victory

1861 Benito Juarez, president of a bankrupt Mexico, suspends interest payment on the nation's foreign debt

1861 Mathew Brady sends teams ot photographers to the various battle fronts to ensure a thorough photographic record of the American Civil War

1861 Queen Victoria likes Adam Bede so much that she commissions Edward Henry Corbould to paint for her two scenes from the novel

1861 An official National Eisteddfod is held for the first time in Wales, in Aberdare

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1861 Chinese immigrants to Australia are the victims of violent racial attacks at Lambing Flat

1861 Shots are fired against the Federal military garrison in Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour, launching the American Civil War

1861 Richmond, the state capital of Virginia, becomes the capital of the Southern Confederacy

1861 English chemist and physicist William Crookes isolates a new element, thallium

1861 George Eliot publishes Silas Marner, the story of a miser who loses his gold but finds happiness in adopting a child

1861 After four years of consultation, Alexander II issues a decree freeing Russia's millions of serfs

1861 Lagos, on the coast of Nigeria, is annexed as a British colony when the royal family prove unable or unwilling to end the slave trade

1861 The seven members of the newly formed Confederacy elect Jefferson Davis as their provisional president

1861 Seven southern states, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, agree to form the Confederate States of America

1861 The Liberals recover Mexico City and elect Benito Juarez as president

1860 George Eliot publishes The Mill on the Floss, her novel about the childhood of Maggie and Tom Tulliver

1860 Charles Dickens begins serial publication of his novel "Great Expectations" (in book form 1861)

1860 South Carolina becomes the first southern state to secede from the Union in response to Lincoln's election

1860 Republican contender Abraham Lincoln is elected US president with only 39% of the popular vote and no electoral votes in eleven southern states

1860 British and French forces occupy Beijing and burn the imperial summer palace, at the end of the Second Opium War

1860 US adventurer William Walker, thrown out of Nicaragua in 1857, is executed in Honduras

1860s Mortlake’s brewery becomes prosperous through contracts supplying beer (India

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Pale Ale) to the British army in India

1860-1863 Work starts on the Temperate House (after the contractor William Cubitt has altered Burton's designs) and the main block and the octagons are completed by 1863. The government then halts the project because of severe cost overruns.

1860 Garibaldi crosses from Sicily to the mainland and by September is in Naples

1860 Florence Nightingale opens a training school for nurses in St Thomas's Hospital, establishing nursing as a profession

1860 German immigrants arriving in the USA now outnumber even the Irish

1860 Lincoln becomes the Republican presidential candidate, benefiting from a Democratic party split on the issue of slavery

1860 Garibaldi lands at Marsala in Sicily in May with his thousand Redshirts, and wins control of the island for the king in waiting, Victor Emmanuel II

1860 German chemist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and technician Peter Desdega perfect the non-luminous gas burner for use in the laboratory

1860 Mail is carried by horse relay from Missouri to California, travelling 2000 miles in ten days in the service known as the Pony Express

1860 The treaty of Turin brings much of north Italy under the control of Cavour (for the kingdom of Sardinia), who in return cedes Savoy and Nice to France

1859 US artist James McNeill Whistler settles in London, which he makes his home for the rest of his life

1859 Edward FitzGerald publishes The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, romantic translations of the work of the Persian poet

1859 Charles Dickens publishes his French Revolution novel, A Tale of Two Cities

1859 Abolitionst John Brown is convicted of treason at Harper's Ferry and is hanged

1859 John Brown is captured leading a group of abolitionists to seize arms from the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry

1859 Tennyson publishes the first part of Idylls of the King, a series of linked poems about Britain's mythical king Arthur

1859 Samuel Smiles provides an inspiring ideal of Victorian enterprise in Self-Help, a manual for ambitious young men

1859 In On Liberty John Stuart Mill makes the classic liberal case for the priority of the

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freedom of the individual

1859 French author Stendhal publishes his novel La Chartreuse de Parme ('The Charterhouse of Parma')

1859 After a six-year campaign by Sir William Hooker, the government allocates £10,000 for a new conservatory - the Temperate House - to be built to designs by Decimus Burton.

1859 Edwin L. Drake strikes oil in Pennsylvania, leading to several local oil rushes

1859 Frozen remains and a document are finally found to reveal the fate of the Franklin expedition of 1845 to the NorthWest Passage

1859 June Marian Evans reluctantly allows her publisher to admit the truth of rumours that George Eliot is Marian Evans, also known as Mrs Lewes

1859 French and Piedmontese forces defeat the Austrians decisively at Solferino, in a battle involving appalling casualties

1859 A 13-ton bell is installed above London's Houses of Parliament, soon giving its name (Big Ben) to both the clock and the clock-tower

1859 The principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia merge as a single new entity, to be called Romania

1859 Liberal leader Lord Palmerston returns to office as the British prime minister after the collapse of Derby's coalition government

1859 The opera Faust, by French composer Charles Gounod, has its premiere in Paris

1859 A French and Piedmontese army liberates Milan from Austrian rule

1859 February English author George Eliot wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bede

1859 Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research

1859 February Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes move from Parkshot in Richmond to Holly Lodge in Wandsworth

1859 Joseph Bazalgette is given the task of providing London with a desperately needed new system of sewers

1858 Chelsea Bridge opens, designed by Thomas Page

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1858 completes his 4-hour opera The Trojans (not performed as a complete work until 1890)

1858 Speke reaches Lake Victoria and guesses that it is probably the source of the Ni

1858 The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, is deposed by the British and exiled to Rangoon, in Burma

1858 Napoleon III sends forces to capture the port of Da Nang, beginning the French colonization of Vietnam

1858 An Irish branch of the US Fenians is established as the Irish Republican Brotherhood

1858 US entrepreneur Cyrus W. Field succeeds in laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, but it fails after only a month

1858 The stench in central London, rising from the polluted Thames in a hot summer, creates what becomes known as the Great Stink

1858 Longfellow uses a romantic story of early New England for his narrative poem The Courtship of Miles Standish

1858 Oliver Wendell Holmes' book The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is the first in a breakfast-table series

1858 Lionel Nathan Rothschild becomes the first Jew to sit in Britain's House of Commons, taking his oath on the Old Testament

1858 The clock tower at Westminster, designed by Pugin and now commonly known now as Big Ben, is completed

1858 Under the Treaty of Aigun, Russia wins from China the valuable Pacific coastline down to Vladivostok

1858 The Treaty of Tientsin, ending the Second Opium War, gives European powers new rights to intervene in Chinese affairs

1858 Charles Darwin is alarmed to receive in his morning post a paper by Alfred Russell Wallace, outlining very much his own theory of evolution

1858 The first block of a new building for the Public Record Office is completed in Chancery Lane, City of London, with further extensions added 1868-1899

1858 The India Act places India under the direct control of the British government, ending the rule of the East India Company

1858 Abraham Linclon comes to national prominence through his debates on slavery with

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Stephen Douglas, his rival for an Illinois seat in the Senate

1858 The end of the Indian Mutiny is followed by brutal British retaliation

1858 Napoleon III and Cavour hatch a secret plan at Plombièes to tempt Austria into war in north Italy, and agree how to divide up the spoils

1858 Brunel dies just before the maiden voyage of his gigantic final project, the luxury liner The Great Eastern

1858 Lucknow is retaken by the British, nearly a year after it fell to the rebels

1858 Burton and Speke reach Lake Tanganyika at Ujiji, a place later famous for the meeting between Livingstone and Stanley

1858 John O'Mahony, an Irish emigrant to the USA, founds the Fenian Brotherhood as a secret organization supporting the Irish republican cause

1858 Conservatives seize Mexico City at the start of a civil war against the Liberal government

1858 Palmerston's government collapses and Lord Derby heads another Conservative minority administration

1858 'Amos Barton' and two other stories are published together, as Scenes of Clerical Life, under the pseudonym George Eliot

1857 October In the cramped sitting room that she shares as a study with Lewes, Marian Evans begins writing her first novel, Adam Bede

1857 Kneller Hall is bought by the War Department and reopened as the Military School of Music, later the Royal Military School of music.

1857 Acts of exceptional valour in the Crimean War are rewarded with a new medal, the Victoria Cross, made from the metal of captured Russian guns

1857 After being besieged for five months in Lucknow, the remnants of the British garrison finally escape

1857 In Tom Brown's Schooldays Thomas Hughes depicts the often brutal aspects of an English public school

1857 The old Cromwell House is demolished and a new one, designed by Robert Philip Pope, is completed by June 1858

1857 Charles Baudelaire publishes his first and extremely influential collection of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal

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1857 The Boers of the southern Transvaal declare independence as the South African Republic

1857 Animal fat on a new issue of cartridges sparks off the Indian Mutiny, also know as the First War of Indian Independence

1857 French chemist Louis Pasteur proves the existence of micro-organisms by showing that a liquid will only ferment if exposed to contamination from the air

1857 An ultra-reactionary Supreme Court judgement in the Dred Scott case heightens US tensions over slavery

1857 Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke set off from Bagamoyo in their search for the source of the Nile

1857 Russian exile Alexander Herzen, publishes in London a radical newspaper called Kolokol (The Bell)

1857 The Haughwout Store, a five-storey building in New York, instals the first Otis safety elevator

1857 David Livingstone urges upon a Cambridge audience the high ideal of taking 'commerce and Christianity' into Africa

1856 The Kneller Hall Training School closes.

1856 Democrat candidate James Buchanan wins the US presidential election, defeating Republican John C Fr&eqacute;mont

1856 An incident aboard the Arrow, flying a British flag, gives the British the pretext to launch the Second Opium War

1856 English chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally creates the first synthetic die, aniline purple (now known as mauve)

1856 Gustave Flaubert publishes Madame Bovary, a novel of frustrated romanticism in a provincial French context

1856 Victoria and Albert complete their fairy-tale castle at Balmoral, adding greatly to the nation's romantic view of Scotland

1856 G.H. Lewes encourages Marian to try her hand at fiction and her first story, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton' is successfully published

1856 An American adventurer, William Walker, wins control of the government in Nicaragua and for a year rules as president

1856 Abolitionist John Brown presides over the lynching of five pro-slavery men at

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Pottawatomie in Kansas

1856 The first Neanderthal man to be discovered is unearthed by quarry workers in the Neander valley, near Düsseldorf

1856 The treaty of Paris ends the Crimean War, limiting Russia's special powers in relation to Turkey

1855 English author Anthony Trollope publishes The Warden, the first in his series of six Barsetshire novels

1855 October 3 Marian Evans (George Eliot) and G.H. Lewes move into lodgings at 8 Parkshot in Richmond, with Mrs Croft as their landlady

1855 Tennyson publishes a long narrative poem, Maud, a section of which ('Come into the garden, Maud') becomes famous as a song

1855 After a siege of nearly a year the Russians abandon Sebastopol, but the Turkish alliance is too exhausted to pursue the conflict

1855 The Christmas issue of the Illustrated London News includes chromolithographs, introducing the era of colour journalism

1855 Longfellow publishes his American Indian epic, The Song of Hiawatha, in an irresistibly catchy metre

1855 An Ethiopian baron usurps the throne and proclaims himself emperor, as TheodoreII

1855 The Christian Socialism of F.D. Maurice and others is mocked by its opponents as 'muscular Christianity'

1855 Liberal leaders Juan Alvarez and Ignacio Comonfort launch a political programme in Mexico that becomes know simply as 'the Reform'

1855 English artist William Simpson sends sketches from the Crimea which achieve rapid circulation in Britain as tinted lithographs

1855 John Everett Millais marries Effie Gray, previously the wife of John Ruskin

1855 David Livingstone, moving down the Zambezi, comes upon the Victoria Falls

1855 The first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is published anonymously, at his own expense, and contains just 12 poems

1855 April Calling themselves Mr and Mrs Lewes, Marian and George move into lodgings at 7 Clarence Row in East Sheen

1855 The Panama Railroad company completes a line between the Atlantic and the

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Pacific, providing America's first transcontinental link

1855 By 1855 the Southwark and Vauxhall, the Grand Junction and the West Middlesex Water Companies have all established works at Hampton and these are now collectively known as Hampton Waterworks

1855 Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat combines realism and symbolism in an extreme example of Pre-Raphaelite characteristics

1855 Lord Palmerston heads the coalition government in Britain after Lord Aberdeen loses a vote of confidence on his conduct of the Crimean War

1855 On their return to England, Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes pretend to be married (Lewes is unable to get a divorce)

1855 Roger Fenton travels out from England to the Crimea – the world's first war photographer

1855-61 Frances restores and enlarges Strawberry Hill including the addition of the Waldegrave Drawing Room, spending in excess of £100,000.

1855 Alfred Mynn stands for his picture to be taken

1855 Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole sets up her own 'British Hotel' in the Crimea to provide food and nursing for soldiers in need

1854 Pope Pius IX issues a papal bull declaring that the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary is to be an article of faith for Catholics

1854 Within six weeks of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, Tennyson publishes a poem finding heroism in the disaster

1854 An inconclusive engagement at Inkerman means that the allies in the Crimea have to dig in for the winter besieging Sebastopol

1854 An inconclusive battle at Balaklava includes the Charge of the Light Brigade, with British cavalry recklessly led towards Russian guns

1854 Florence Nightingale, responding to reports of horrors in the Crimea, sets sail with a party of twenty-eight nurses

1854 British and French troops land at Sebastopol, to besiege the port, and win a limited victory over the Russians at the river Alma

1854 Thoreau publishes an account of his two years of self-sufficient transcendentalism in his hut at Walden Pond

1854 A London editor decides to send a reporter, William Howard Russell ('Russell of The

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Times'), to the Crimean front

1854 Britain and France enter the war between Turkey and Russia, on the Turkish side

1854 English physician John Snow proves that cholera is spread by infected water (from a pump in London's Broad Street)

1854 Australian gold diggers, angered by the requirement to purchase a licence, make a defiant stand at the stockade

1854 Ferdinand de Lesseps is granted the concession to construct a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea

1854 William Baikie, on an expedition up the Niger, protects his men from malaria by administering quinine

1854 Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes flout British convential morality by travelling openly to Germany together

1854 Austrian monk Gregor Mendel begins his study of pea plants in the garden of the Abbey of St Thomas in Brno

1854 US minister to Mexico James Gadsden secures a treaty by which the USA purchases from Mexico much of southern Arizona

1854 The controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act passes into law, enabling citizens of these territories to decide whether or not to allow slavery

1854 Commodore Matthew Perry, commanding a powerful US fleet, persuades the Japanese to open their country to western trade – ending their period of isolation

1854 The Boers establish the Orange Free State as an independent republic, with its own custom-built constitution

1854 US inventor Elisha Otis dramatically demonstrates his new safety elevator, cutting the rope suspending his platform in New York's Crystal Palace

1854 The Russian revolutionary and exile Alexander Herzen spends much of this year in St Helena Terrace before moving to Twickenham

1854 An anti-slavery movement, formed in the USA to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act, adopts a resonant name, calling itself the Republican party

1854 Robert Schumann throws himself into the Rhine, in an attempt to commit suicide, and spends the last two years of his life in an asylum

1854 British and French warships move up through the Straits and enter the Black Sea in support of Turkey

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1854 A cricket match is played on the sea bed at Goodwin Sands

1854 The Fleet sewer is in need of repair

1853 The hypodermic syringe with a plunger is simultaneously developed in France and in Scotland

1853 In the expectation of British and French support, the Ottoman sultan declares war on Russia - launching the Crimean War

1853 Antoinette Brown becomes the first female to be ordained a minister in the USA, in the First Congregational Church in South Butler, NY

1853 Russia occupies two Ottoman principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, on the west coast of the Black Sea

1853 France and Britain despatch their fleets to the Dardanelles, in readiness to go through the Straits to the Black Sea

1853 G.H. Lewes leaves his serially unfaithful wife and begins an affair with Marian Evans

1853 In a worsening diplomatic crisis, Russia puts her Black Sea fleet in a state of alert at Sebastopol

1853 Just six weeks after the success of Il Trovatore, Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata is a disaster at its premiere in Venice

1853 Hormuzd Rassam discovers the magnficent lion-hunt reliefs in the palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh

1853 The Taiping rebels capture the Chinese city of Nanjing and make it their capital

1853 David Livingstone makes a heroic six-month journey from the Zambezi river to the west coast of Africa

1853 Giuseppe Verdi's opera Il Trovatore is a success at its premiere in Rome

1852 London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases

1852 After the establishment of the Royal Botanical Gardens, a library and herbarium is opened at Hunter’s House on north-west side of Kew Green.

1852 Lord Aberdeen, leader of the '' minority of the Conservative party, forms a new coalition government with the Liberals

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1852 Louis Napoleon, asking the French people to approve his elevation to emperor as Napoleon III, receives a resounding yes in the plebiscite

1852 Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce wins the US presidential election, defeating his Whig opponent Winfield Scott

1852 Pugin dies, at home in Ramsgate, and is buried in the chantry of the church he is building next door, St Augustine's

1852 Russia insists that her exclusive rights over the Holy Places are enshrined in the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji

1852 In an Argentinian civil war, Urquiza defeats the dictator Rosas and is subsequently elected president (in 1854)

1852 The Mortlake brewery, after passing through several hands, is acquired by the Phillips family

1852 US entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt conveys passengers across the American continent through Nicaragua by steamship and horse and carriage

1852 The church of St Mary Magdalen in Mortlake, designed in Gothic style by Gilbert Blount, is completed

1852 publishes a massively successful antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that sells 300,000 copies in its first year

1852 Scottish physicist William Thomson formulates the second law of thermodynamics, concerning the transfer of heat within a closed system

1852 In the four years since the discovery of gold, the population of California has leapt from 14,000 to 250,000

1852 France demands that Turkey should end Russia's exclusive control of the Christian Holy Places in the Ottoman empire

1852 The Crystal Palace is dismantled in Hyde Park, to be re-erected south of the river Thames at Sydenham

1852 Queen Victoria opens the new Houses of Parliament, designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Pugin

1852 The first Metropolis Water Act is passed which forbids the taking of water by the water companies from the tidal Thames and this leads to the establishment of what was to become Hampton Waterworks

1852 The citizens of the US are scandalized to discover that the Mormons practise polygamy

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1852 After years of strain and overwork, Pugin has a nervous breakdown and he is certified insane

1852 Lord John Russell's Whig administration collapses, and Lord Derby follows him as a Conservative prime minister at the head of a coalition government

1852 Pugin does not attend the opening of the completed Houses of Parliament, and there is hardly a mention of him

1851 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are entered in the ten-yearly census, and were staying on the night in question in Buckingham Palace

1851 The president of France, Louis Napoleon, stages a coup d'état, rounding up his political opponents during a long December night

1851 A journalist in the Terre Haute Express gives a piece of advice, 'Go west, young man', that chimes perfectly with the US pioneer spirit

1851 Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick; or, The Whale, a novel based on his own 18- month experience on a whaler in 1841-2

1851 Lord and Lady Russell of Pembroke Lodge found the Russell School in Petersham

1851 Marian Evans meets the journalist George Henry Lewes in William Jeff's bookshop in Burlington Arcade

1851 Richard Wagner writes an anti-semitic tract, Jewishness in Music

1851 US author Nathaniel Hawthorne bases his novel The House of the Seven Gables on a curse invoked against his own family

1851 The New York Times is founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond as a conservative daily with an emphasis on accuracy

1851 The first American branch of the Young Men's Christian Association is established in Boston

1851 The Great Exhibition attracts six million visitors to London's new Crystal Palace in a period of only six months

1851 In London's Great Exhibition numerous examples of Pugin's designs and craftsmanship are displayed by different exhibitors

1851 Marian Evans (her new spelling of her name) moves to London and gets a job as subeditor of Westminster Review

1851 The Australian gold rush begins with the discovery of gold fields at Ballarat and a

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few months later at Bendigo

1851 French physicist Léon Foucault demonstrates the rotation of the earth by means of a long pendulum suspended in the Pantheon in Paris

1851 Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, built in London in six months, is the world's first example of prefabricated architecture

1851 English textile magnate Titus Salt begins to build Saltaire as a model industrial village for his workers

1851 German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz invents the ophthalmoscope, making it possible for a doctor to examine the inside of a patient's eye

1851 English photographer Frederick Scott Archer publishes the details of his collodion process, a marked improvement on the earlier calotype negative

1851 Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto, based on a play by Victor Hugo, is a huge success at its premiere in Venice

1851 Thomas Cubitt completes Osborne House, designed as a quiet retreat for Victoria and Albert on the Isle of Wight

1851 Samson Raphael Hirsch becomes rabbi of a synagogue in Frankfurt, where he develops the theme of neo-Orthodoxy

1851 An American clergyman, L.L. Langstroth, discovers the 'bee space', which becomes a standard feature of the modern beehive

1850 English cartoonist John Tenniel begins a 50-year career drawing for the satirical magazine Punch

1850 The Kneller Hall Training School for the Teaching of Pauper and Criminal Children opens with Dr Frederick Temple as Principal.

1850 Allan Pinkerton retires from the Chicago police force and forms the Pinkerton National Detective Agency

1850 Whitton Place is demolished and the grounds are rejoined with Whitton Park.

1850 A rebellion against the Qing dynasty, led by Christian convert Hong Xiuquan, breaks out in southern China

1850 Jenny Lind, the 'Swedish Nightingale', has a great success touring the USA in a show presented by P.T. Barnum

1850 Escaped slave Harriet Tubman makes the first of many dangerous journeys back into Maryland to bring other slaves into freedom

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1850 US Secretary of State John Clayton and British ambassador Henry Bulwer come to an agreement about the building of a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific

1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes his novel The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester Prynne is forced to wear the letter A for Adultress

1850 The Fugitive Slave Act, concerned with the arrest of runaway slaves, is the most contentious part of the Compromise of 1850

1850 The US Congress passes the Compromise of 1850, designed to defuse the growing crisis over slavery

1850 US president Zachary Taylor dies after a short illness and is succeeded by his vice- president, Millard Fillmore

1850 Brazil, historically the world's second largest importer of slaves from Africa, finally bans the slave trade

1850 The slave trade, but not slavery itself, is banned in Washington and the district of Columbia

1850 California is admitted to the union just two years after being acquired from Mexico

1850 British engineer Robert Stephenson completes a box-girder railway bridge over the Menai Strait, between Anglesey and mainland Wales

1850 Alfred Tennyson's elegy for a friend, In Memoriam, captures perfectly the Victorian mood of heightened sensibility

1850 As many as 50,000 US pioneers travel west this year on the Oregon Trail

1850 The brothers James and John Harper launch in New York Harper's Monthly Magazine, still published today

1850 British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston sends a naval squadron to seize Greek ships in the Don Pacifico case

1850 The British government buys the Danish fortresses on the Gold Coast, including Christiansborg castle in Accra

1850 The Scottish missionary David Livingstone is profoundly shocked by what he sees of the slave trade at the heart of Africa

1850 Queen Victoria knights her favourite painter of animals, Edwin Landseer

1850 Fyodor Dostoevsky begins four years of hard labour in Siberia for revolutionary activities

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1849 Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky undergoes a mock execution, after being sentenced to death for revolutionary activities against tsar Nicholas I

1849 Dante Gabriel Rossetti depicts his sister Christina in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin

1849 Vancouver Island is given the status of a British crown colony, to be followed by British Columbia in 1858

1849 Expelled from Germany after the year of revolutions, Marx makes his home in tolerant London

1849 The Habsburgs recover power in both Austria and Hungary

1849 Pope Pius IX returns to Rome under the protection of French troops, with his enthusiasm for any form of change much reduced.

1849 In Vienna the younger Johann Strauss succeeds his father as the Waltz King

1849 The gold rush to California gathers pace during 1849, causing the prospectors to become known as 'forty-niners'

1849 Scottish painter David Roberts completes publication of his 6-volume The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia

1849 An anti-British mob attacks the New York theatre where William Macready is appearing as Macbeth, leaving 22 dead and many injured

1849 Nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth announces the independence of Hungary and the deposition of the Habsburg dynasty

1849 Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, already serialized in 1847, is published in book form

1849 Delegates of the German states offer the imperial crown of a united Germany to Frederick William IV, the king of Prussia, who rejects it

1849 Giuseppe Garibaldi arrives from exile in South America to defend the new Roman republic against a French army

1849 A British victory at the Battle of Gujarat effectively ends the second Anglo-Sikh war, and is followed by annexation of the Punjab

1849 Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels

1849 A new Roman republic is proclaimed, with veteran agitator Giuseppe Mazzini in the leading role

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1849 Local painter and photographer George Hilditch sets up his easel under Richmond's new railway bridge

1849 Prince Albert is the driving force behind the plans for a Great Exhibition in London

1848 Metternich and his family leave Vienna, in this year of revolutions, and live in Trumpeters' House until October 1849

1848 Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë die within a period of eight months

1848 18-year-old Francis Joseph becomes emperor of Austria when his uncle, Ferdinand I, abdicates at the end of a year of unrest

1848 In a three-cornered US presidential election Whig candidate Zachary Taylor defeats Democrat Lewis Cass and the Free-Soil party's Martin van Buren

1848 An uprising in Rome causes Pope Pius IX to flee for safety to a coastal fortress at Gaeta

1848 The second Anglo-Sikh war begins when a British army invades the Punjab to suppress a local uprising

1848 The prime minister of the papal states, Pellegrino Rossi, is assassinated in Rome

1848 A utopian community dedicated to the sharing of both property and sexual favours is established by John Humphrey Noyes near Oneida, New York

1848 English art students Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

1848 Oh! Susannah is in the first published collection of popular songs by Stephen Collins Foster

1848 Pugin marries his third wife, Jane Knill, with whom he has two more children

1848 Louis Napoleon is elected the first president of France's new Second Republic

1848 Suppression of unrest in Hungary provokes a third violent uprising in Vienna and another flight by Ferdinand I, this time to Olomouc

1848 US feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organize a convention on women's rights in Seneca Falls, New York

1848 Honoré de Balzac completes publication of La Comédie Humaine, a 17-volume collected edition of his numerous novels and stories

1848 The Palm House, today "the world's most important surviving Victorian glass and

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iron structure" is completed. Although originally told to hide it among trees, Kew's director William Hooker succeeds in placing it in a prominent position, thanks to support from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

1848 English caricaturist George Cruikshank publishes The Drunkard's Children in support of the developing Temperance movement

1848 Harry Smith annexes for Britain the land between the Orange and Vaal rivers, calling it the Orange River Sovereignty

1848 Scottish physicist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, proposes the 'absolute' scale of temperature

1848 Martial law is imposed in Prague after a demonstration by radical Czech students following a Pan-Slav congress

1848 With Wisconsin admitted as the 30th state, the western boundary of the USA now runs from Lake Superior to the

1848 Another uprising in Vienna causes the emperor Ferdinand I to flee for safety to Innsbruck

1848 An uprising in Vienna leads to the resignation, on the following day, of the long- serving chancellor Klemens von Metternich

1848 The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels, is published in Paris with the ringing slogan: 'Workers of the world, unite!'

1848 The Wilmot Proviso is defeated in the US Senate, heightening north-south tensions on the issue of slavery

1848 A revolution in Paris in February removes Louis-Philippe and introduces France's second republic

1848 The Prussian army is the first to adopt a breech-loading rifle, the 'needle-gun' developed by gunsmith Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse

1848 Two New York girls, Maggie and Katie Fox, claim to be in touch with the spirit of a murdered man, thus launching the modern cult of spiritualism

1848 Richmond's railway bridge, the first to cross the Thames, is built to continue the line on towards Windsor

1848 A treaty signed in Guadalupe-Hidalgo, ending the Mexican-American War, gives the US six new states

1848 An uprising in Sicily in January starts off Europe's 'year of revolutions'

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1848 Gold is found on the property of John Sutter, at Coloma on the Sacramento river in California, and news of it launches the first gold rush

1847 James Young Simpson is the first to deliver a baby (christened Anaesthesia) using chloroform

1847 Kneller Hall is bought by the Committee of the Privy Council for Education. The house is largely demolished and rebuilt with nothing remaining of Kneller's original house.

1847 Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights follows just two months after her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre

1847 Napoleon's widow, the empress Marie Louise, now the duchess of Parma, dies in Parma

1847 William Hickling Prescott follows his great work on Mexico with a 2-volume History of the Conquest of Peru

1847 Queen Victoria leases Pembroke Lodge, as a country retreat, to her Prime Minister, Lord John Russell

1847 Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his first collection of poems, many of which have appeared first in The Dial

1847 English mathematician George Boole describes Boolean algebra in his pamphlet Mathematical Analysis of Logic

1847 Liberia wins independence and international recognition as a republic

1847 Barry's new House of Lords is opened, with lavishly beautiful interiors and furnishings by Pugin

1847 Brigham Young selects the site of Salt Lake City as the place for Mormon settlement

1847 Don Pacifico's house in Athens is burnt by an anti-Semitic crowd, provoking an international incident

1847 Pretorius leads the last Boer families out of Natal and over the Drakensberg to the high veld

1847 Charlotte becomes the first of the Brontë sisters to have a novel published — Jane Eyre

1847 At a congress in London Engels persuades a group of radical Germans to adopt the name Communist League

1847 Camillo Benso di Cavour founds a newspaper in north Italy and calls it Il

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Risorgimento ('The Resurgence')

1847 Frances, Lady Waldegrave, inherits Strawberry Hill on her husband's death in 1846, marries George Granville Harcourt, an elderly Liberal MP, and establishes herself as a leading Liberal hostess.

1847 English author William Makepeace Thackeray begins publication of his novel Vanity Fair in monthly parts (book form 1848)

1847 Scottish obstetrician James Simpson uses anaesthetic (ether, and later in the year choloroform) to ease difficulty in childbirth

1847 A new Factory Act is passed in Britain, limiting the working day of women and children to a maximum of ten hours

1846 The three Brontë sisters jointly publish a volume of their poems and sell just two copies

1846/7 William Chillingworth, who bought Radnor House in 1842, substantially remodels it in the fashionable Italianate style.

1846 Members of the Donner Party, on the trail to California, survive by eating human flesh when trapped by snow in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada

1846 Landlords in Scotland begin to clear crofters from Highland estates so as to provide pasture for sheep

1846 A dentist in Boston, William Morton, uses ether as an anaesthetic while surgeon John Collins Warren removes a tumour in a patient's neck

1846 The US Congress establishes the Smithsonian Institution with a bequest to the nation by Englishman James Smithson

1846 After marrying secretly, the English poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett go abroad to live in Florence

1846 Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah has its premiere in England, in the city of Birmingham

1846 Brigham Young leads the migration of Mormons west up the Missouri from Illinois

1846 July22 The first train on the new London and South Western Railway line from Nine Elms passes through Barnes on its way to a rapturous arrival in Richmond, with a brass band and church bells ringing

1846 With his Conservative party split, Peel's government falls and Lord John Russell becomes British prime minister at the head of a Whig administration

1846 Pugin completes his most spectacularly decorated church, that of St Giles in

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Cheadle, Staffordshire

1846 President Polk sends a US army into Texas, provoking the Mexican-American War

1846 Mary Anne Evans' translation from the German of David Friedrich Strauss's controversial Life of Jesus is published anonymously

1846 The Oregon Treaty establishes the border between Canada and the USA along the 49th parallel to the Pacific

1846 Edward Lear publishes his Book of Nonsense, consisting of limericks illustrated with his own cartoons

1846 The minority of Conservatives supporting Peel become a separate faction, henceforth known as the

1846 The Irish, fleeing from the potato famine at home, become the main group of immigrants to the USA

1846 Francis Parkman travels west into dangerous territory in Wyoming, an adventure he later describes in The Oregon Trail

1846 British prime minister carries a bill to repeal the Corn Laws, splitting his own party in the process

1846 April Work begins on a station at Barnes, which is now the only survivor of the five original stations on the new railway line from Nine Elms to Richmond

1846 The self-contained metal cartridge, with a percussion cap in its base, is patented by a Paris gunsmith named Houiller

1846 The first Anglo-Sikh war ends with the Treaty of Lahore, by which Jammu and Kashmir are ceded to the British

1845 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert follow the German custom of a family Christmas tree, immediately making it popular in Britain

1845 Friedrich Engels, after running a textile factory in Manchester, publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England

1845-1885 Under Sir William Hooker (director 1845--65) and his son Sir Joseph Hooker (director 1865-85) the botanic gardens are greatly increased in size, prestige and scientific excellence.

1845 Brunel's suspension bridge serves Hungerford market

1845 Sewers are enlarged to carry waste to the Thames

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1845 The first Anglo-Sikh war breaks out between Sikh forces in the Punjab and encroaching forces of Britain's East India Company

1845 US author Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an early and thoughtful feminist study of women's place in society

1845 Escaped slave Frederick Douglass publishes the first of three volumes of autobiograrphy

1845 With his emphasis on the subjective experience of human Existenz, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard plants the seed of existentialism

1845 The expansionist slogan 'Manifest Destiny' is coined by journalist John L. O'Sullivan to emphasize the right of the USA to extend west to the Pacific

1845 Pugin begins building, next to his own house, the Roman Catholic church of St Augustine, reached through a cloister

1845 Henry David Thoreau moves into a hut that he has built for himself in the woods at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts

1845 English naval officer John Franklin sets off with two ships, Erebus and Terror, to search for the Northwest Passage

1845 British archaeologist Henry Layard, in his first month of digging in Iraq, discovers the Assyrian city of Nimrud

1845 New Yorker Alexander Cartwright devises the set of rules that become the basis of the modern game of baseball

1845 Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven and Other Poems

1845 Alfred Mynn files for bankruptcy

1844 Louis Philippe, now King of France, visits Orleans House during a royal visit to Britain.

1844 Democratic candidate James Polk is elected president of the USA, defeating the Whig Henry Clay

1844 Dr Weiss, soon to be followed by Dr Ellis, establishes a hydropathy clinic at Sudbrook Park, which runs for twenty years despite accusations of manslaughter when patients die following the cold water-treatment

1844 Samuel Morse and his assistant Alfred Vail complete the first telegraph line, between New York and Baltimore

1844 The other half of Hispaniola joins Haiti in declaring independence, as the Dominican

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Republic

1844 Pugin's second wife, Louisa, mother of five of his children, dies

1844 The Mormon leader, Joseph Smith, and his brother are killed by an armed mob in Nauvoo

1844 The Young Men's Christian Association is founded in London by British drapery assistant George Williams

1844 Richard Turner wins the government contract to build a great new glasshouse in Kew Gardens, the Palm House, with Decimus Burton acting as architectural consultant.

1844 James Polk pledges in his presidential campaign to include the self-proclaimed republic of Texas in the USA

1844 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meet in Paris and become life-long friends

1844 The Russian tsar, Nicholas I, calls Turkey 'the sick man of Europe'

1844 In his novel Coningsby Benjamin Disraeli develops the theme of uniting 'two nations', the rich and the poor

1844 Daniel O'Connell is acquitted on appeal and released from prison

1844 Pugin publishes a spectacular volume of scholarly text and lavish illustrations, his Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume

1844 The Hungarian diet decrees that Magyar, rather than German, is to be the official language of the kingdom

1844 The first great entrepreneur of the railway age, George Hudson, becomes known as the Railway King

1844 A new Royal Exchange opens

1843 Ebenezer Scrooge mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

1843 Daniel O'Connell is convicted of seditious conspiracy and is sentenced to prison

1843 Topping's Wharf burns

1843 Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz completes his pioneering Poissons Fossiles ('Fossil Fish'), classifying more than 1500 categories

1843 William Hickling Prescott brings the Conquistadors dramatically to life in his 3-

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volume History of the Conquest of Mexico

1843 Mendelssohn's overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, amplified now with incidental music, is greeted as a masterpiece at a performance of the play in Potsdam

1843 Pugin begins building a house for his family, now known as The Grange, at Ramsgate

1843 The frontispiece to Pugin's Revival of Christian Architecture displays three cathedrals and twenty-two other religious buildings designed by him

1843 Isambard Kingdom Brunel launches the Great Britain, the first iron steamship designed for the transatlantic passenger trade

1843 The statue of Nelson, by E.H. Baily, is placed on top of its column in Trafalgar Square

1843 The Great Migration across the north American continent to the Pacific establishes the Oregon Trail

1843 Henry Cole commissions 1000 copies of the world's first Christmas card, designed for him by John Calcott Horsley

1843 Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Pit and the Pendulum, a cliff-hanging tale of terror at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition

1843 The British take control of the existing Boer republic and proclaim Natal a British protectorate

1843 The Flying Dutchman is the first of Richard Wagner's major operas to be staged, with its premiere in Dresden

1843 The Brunel engineers, father and son, finish an 18-year project tunnelling under the Thames between Wapping and Rotherhithe

1842 Thomas Young, a tea merchant, builds a new house on the site of the original Pope's Villa.

1842 The First Opium War ends with the island of Hong Kong, and extensive new trading rights, ceded to Britain in the Treaty of Nanking

1842 US secretary of state Daniel Webster and British negotiator Lord Ashburton resolve US-Canadian boundary disputes

1842 English author Thomas Babington Macaulay publishes a collection of stirring ballads, Lays of Ancient Rome

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1842 Honoré de Balzac begins publication of a collected edition of his fiction under the title La Comédie Humaine

1842 US showman P.T. Barnum draws huge crowds to the New York premises where his attractions include 'General Tom Thumb', a 4-year-old midget

1842 The publication of the first part of the satirical novel Dead Souls, by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, proves a sensation in Russia

1842 Austrian physicist Christian Doppler explains the acoustic effect now known by his name

1842 English poet Robert Browning publishes a vivid narrative poem about the terrible revenge of The Pied Piper of Hamelin

1842 Edwin Pearce Christy launches the Virginia Minstrels, later to become America's most popular under the name Christy's Minstrels

1842 Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell pioneers mass political demonstrations, which become known as 'monster meetings'

1842 The success of the opera Nabucco, premiered in Milan, is a turning point in the fortunes of Giuseppe Verdi

1842 The young Friedrich Engels is sent from Germany to manage the family cotton- spinning factory in Manchester

1842 The seventh Earl is heavily in debt and sells off the contents of Strawberry Hill. 'The Great Sale' starts on 25 April 1842 and last for 32 days raising over £33,000.

1842 The British abandon Kabul, losing most of the garrison force in the withdrawal to India and bringing to an end the first Anglo-Afghan war

1842 Lord Shaftesbury's Mines Act makes it illegal for boys under 13, and women and girls of any age, to be employed underground in Britain

1842 Robert Peel's Conservative administration reintroduces income tax in Britain, at a fixed level of approximately 3%

1841 Britain sends four naval ships up the river Niger to make anti-slavery treaties with local kings

1841 Fire demolishes the Armoury in the Tower

1841 US social reformer Catherine Beecher publishes an influential book to empower women, Treatise on Domestic Economy

1841 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems includes 'The Village

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Blacksmith' and 'The Wreck of the Hesperus'

1841 Pugin publishes The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture

1841 With a teetotallers' rail trip for 570 people, Thomas Cook introduces the notion of the package tour

1841-51 Sir William Hooker, the first Director of Kew Gardens, rents Brick Farm and re- names it West Park

1841 On the sudden death of US president William Henry Harrison, from pneumonia, he is succeeded in the office by his vice-president John Tyler

1841 Horace Greeley founds and edits the New-York Tribune, which will survive for more than a century (till 1966)

1841 Brook Farm, the most famous of the Charles Fourier phalanxes, is established at Dedham near Boston

1841 Fox Talbot patents the 'calotype', introducing the negative-positive process that becomes standard in photography

1841 August Dupin solves the case in Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered to be the first example of a detective story

1841 Robert Peel replaces Lord Melbourne as prime minister after a Conservative victory in the British general election

1841 The Straits Convention, agreed between the European powers and Turkey, is a concerted attempt to prop up the Ottoman empire

1841 Herman Melville goes to sea on the whaler Acushnet and spends more than a year in the south Pacific

1840 Four new boathouses are built by Richmond Bridge, to be occupied chiefly by the watermen families of the Chittys, the Peasleys and the Wheelers, for boat-hiring and boatbuilding.

1840 US lawyer Richard Henry Dana has immediate popular success with Two Years Before the Mast, his account of his time as a merchant seaman

1840 William Henry Harrison wins the US presidential election as the Whig candidate, but dies 30 days after taking office

1840 The 14-year-old Dom Pedro, son of Pedro I, becomes emperor of Brazil as Pedro II

1840 St Peter’s, in Petersham, is almost doubled in size, with new galleries and a much enlarged south transept

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1840 Robert Schumann marries the pianist Clara Wieck, daughter of his first teacher

1840 The first issue of the quarterly magazine The Dial is issued by the Transcendentalists meeting at Ralph Waldo Emerson's home

1840 Victoria marries Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and soon, with nine children, they provide the very image of the ideal Victorian family

1840 Rowland Hill introduces in Britain the world's first postage stamps - the Penny Black and Two Pence Blue

1840 Muhammad Ali, officially viceroy for the Turkish sultan, establishes his own ruling dynasty on the throne of Egypt

1840 Queen Victoria gives Kew Gardens to the nation, as a botanic garden of scientific importance

1840 Robert Schumann composes the song cycle Frauenliebe und -Leben ('Woman's Love and Life')

1840 Napoleon's remains are brought to Paris for burial in Les Invalides, as the Napoleonic legend grows

1840 Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz argues, in his Study on Glaciers, that much of Europe was recently in the grip of an ice age

1840 Strawberry Hill passes through the Waldegrave family to John, who marries Frances Braham in 1839, and on his early death to his brother George, the seventh Earl, who marries his brother's widow.

1840 With Boer help, Mpande removes his brother Dingaan from the Zulu throne and takes his place

1839 The French painter Gustave Courbet moves from his native town of Ornans to Paris

1839 British forces capture Hong Kong, which is subsequently ceded to Britain by China at the end of the first Opium War in 1842

1839 Charles Dickens rents Elm Cottage (later Elm Lodge) in Petersham, while working on Nicholas Nickleby

1839 In the Bedchamber Crisis, Queen Victoria shows steely determination in refusing to dismiss politically committed ladies of her bedchamber

1839 Polish composer Frédéric Chopin completes his Preludes under difficult conditions in Majorca

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1839 British troops invade China after the Chinese authorities seize and destroy the opium stocks of British merchants in Canton

1839 Lord Durham produces his Report on the Affairs of British North America, proposing reforms in the administration of Canada

1839 Andries Pretorius sets up the Boer republic of Natalia, with its capital at Pietermaritzburg

1839 Joseph Smith and the Mormons create the thriving town of Nauvoo in Illinois on the Mississippi

1839 Abd-el-Kader proclaims a holy war against the French in Algeria and begins a military campaign that will last for eight years

1839 A British army invades Afghanistan and instals a puppet ruler, Shuja Shah, as the Afghan amir

1839 Mutiny by slaves on a Spanish vessel leads two years later to a significant abolitionist victory in the Amistad case

1839 Edgar Allan Poe publishes a characteristically gothic tale, The Fall of the House of Usher

1839 The British seize the strategic port of Aden and administer it as a province annexed to India

1839 The London and Croydon railway links with the Greenwich railway

1838 The Royal Exchange, rebuilt after the Great Fire, burns down again

1838 US author Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes Fanshawe, his first novel, at his own expense

1838 In his Divinity School Address, delivered at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson criticizes formal religion and gives priority to personal spiritual experience

1838 US naval officer Charles Wilkes leads a four-year exploration of the Antarctic and Pacific, proving on the way that Antarctica is a continent

1838 Seven Manchester merchants and mill-owners found the Anti-Corn Law League

1838 Pugin designs St Chad's in Birmingham, completed in 1841 and the first cathedral built in England since Christopher Wren's St Paul's

1838 The river Ncome becomes known as the Blood River after thousands of Zulu die attacking Andries Pretorius and the Boers

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1838 Civil war breaks out in Uruguay between the Reds and the Whites, followers respectively of Rivera and Oribe

1838 The Public Records Act creates the Public Record Office with headquarters in existing buildings on the Rolls Estate in Chancery Lane, in the City of London

1838 J.M.W. Turner paints an icon of British art, The Fighting Téméraire

1838 The People's Charter, with its six political demands, launches the Chartist movement in England

1838 John James Audubon completes publication of the 435 plates forming his 4-volume Birds of America

1838 The London Prize Ring rules disallow kicking, gouging, head-butting and biting in the sport of boxing

1838 The Central American Federation splits into Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica

1838 Queen Victoria opens Hampton Court Palace to the public

1838 Five American Indian tribes are forcibly escorted to a new Indian Territory west of the Mississippi in the process that becomes known as the Great Removal

1838 Dingaan's warriors massacre Boer families in a series of dawn raids near the Bloukrans river

1838 During a ceremony to celebrate their treaty with Dingaan, Piet Retief and his Boer companions are overpowered and killed

1838 US inventor Samuel Morse gives the first public demonstration, in Philadelphia, of his electric telegraph

1838 Brunel's Great Western, a wooden paddle-steamer, arives in New York the day after the Sirius, with the record for an Atlantic crossing already reduced to 15 days

1838 An Irish packet steamer, the Sirius, becomes the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, completing the journey to New York in 19 days

1838 A terminus is built at Paddington for the Great Western railway

1837 Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838)

1837 William IV returns a small section of the Green to the inhabitants of Kew.

1837 The first trains run between London and Birmingham on the railway designed by

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Robert Stephenson

1837 Hector Berlioz's requiem mass, the Grande messe des morts, has its first performance in Paris

1837 Pugin's begins work on his first major church, St Mary's in Derby

1837 Zanzibar becomes the main place of residence of the sultan of Oman

1837 Rebellions in Canada reveal widespread discontent with the British administration, particularly among the French settlers

1837 Oberlin College in Ohio becomes the first in the USA to enrol women as degree students

1837 In The American Scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson urges his student audience to heed their own intellectuals rather than those of Europe

1837 Piet Retief reaches a provisional agreement with Dingaan, the Zulu leader, for a Boer settlement in southern Natal

1837 Potgieter defeats the Ndebele at the Marico river and drives them north of the Limpopo

1837 Pugin begins work on his first contribution to country house architecture, adding extensive Gothic details to Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire

1837 The Taylor estate of East Sheen and West Hall passes to the Leyborne-Pophams of Littlecote in

1837 The Whig party in Britain begin referring to themselves as Liberals

1837 The King's Free School in Kew, changing its name by now according to the sex of the sovereign, becomes the Queen's Free School

1837 Work begins on Charles Barry's spectacular design for London's new Houses of Parliament

1837 The 18-year-old Victoria comes to the throne in Britain, beginning the long Victorian era

1837 Piet Retief emerges as the new leader of the Great Trek, replacing Potgieter

1837 After a victory at Vegkop, Boers massacre the inhabitants of a dozen Ndebele villages in secret dawn raids

1837 Alexander Pushkin dies from a stomach wound received in a duel with his brother- in-law, Georges d'Anthès

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1837 Euston Station opens for business on the London and Birmingham railway

1837 The expenses of a cricket match are itemized

1836 The London to Greenwich railway opens

1836 Louis Agassiz builds a hut on the Aar glacier in Switzerland and succeeds in recording gradual movement of the ice

1836 Martin van Buren, previously vice-president to Andrew Jackson, wins the US presidential election on the Democratic ticket

1836 In his essay, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson sets out the fundamentals of the philolosphy of Transcendentalism

1836 HMS Beagle reaches Falmouth, in Cornwall, after a voyage of five years, and Charles Darwin brings with him a valuable collection of specimens

1836 Work begins on the suspension bridge over the river Avon, at Clifton, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel

1836 American professor William Holmes McGuffey writes the first of his immensely popular school reading books

1836 Hendrik Potgieter and the Boers, protected by a laager at Vegkop, hold off an attack by a large force of Ndebele tribesmen

1836 The Portuguese ban the shipping of slaves from the coast of Angola

1836 The Tolpuddle Martyrs are brought back to England from Australia after public protest leads to their sentences being remitted

1836 Sam Houston destroys a Mexican army near the San Jacinto river, completing the seizure of Texas from Mexico

1836 The Inspector General, a farce by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol satirising Russian offialdom, has tsar Nicholas I in the audience for the premiere

1836 A site is selected for Adelaide and emigration begins from Britain to south Australia

1836 24-year-old Charles Dickens begins monthly publication of his first work of fiction, Pickwick Papers (published in book form in 1837)

1836 Sarah and Angelina Grimké join the abolitionist crusade, each publishing a powerful anti-slavery pamphlet in the same year

1836 Pugin publishes his most famous book, Contrasts, a polemical comparison showing

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the 'present decay of taste' compared to medieval architecture

1836 Hendrik Potgieter sets off with some 200 Boers and their cattle at the start of the Great Trek to the north

1836 200 Texans, among them Davy Crockett, hold out for twelve days in San Antonio before being killed in the Alamo by a Mexican army

1836 The inhabitants of the Mexican province of Texas declare their independence as a new republic

1836 Charles Barry wins the competition to design the new Houses of Parliament

1835 English artist Edward Lear begins a series of travels, sketching around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East

1835 The Partisan, set in South Carolina, launches the series of novels by William Gilmore Simms known as the Revolutionary Romances

1835 Henry Bevan buys Cambridge Park with 30 acres of land and enlarges the mansion which becomes known as Cambridge House.

1835 The St Helena Boathouses are mostly let to the three major Richmond lightermen families of Downs, Jackson and Wheeler, for storage of freight and coal

1835 Edward Collins builds ten brick-arch boathouses on St Helena Wharf in Richmond, replacing the previous wooden boatsheds

1835 The architect Charles Barry employs Pugin to design the Gothic detail required in the competition to build the new House of Parliament

1835 A school of landscape painting emerges in New York, with emphasis on the scenery of the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains

1835 Gaetano Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor has its premiere in Naples

1835 Alexis de Tocqueville publishes in French the first two volumes of his extremely influential study Democracy in America

1835 Pugin converts to Roman Catholicism

1835 The New York Sun gains new readers with a convincing report that astronomer John Herschel has observed men and animals on the moon

1835 French author Honoré de Balzac publishes Le Père Goriot, one of the key novels that he later includes in La Comédie Humaine

1835 Fox Talbot exposes the first photographic negatives, among them a view looking out

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through an oriel window in Lacock Abbey

1835 Juan Manuel de Rosas becomes dictator of Argentina and imposes a brutally repressive conservative regime

1835 Melbourne, founded by settlers from Tasmania, develops as the centre of a sheep- rearing community

1835 Election results in Britain mean that Robert Peel is unable to form a Tory government, and Lord Melbourne returns as Britain's prime minister

1835 St Helena Terrace is built beside the Thames, on land sold by the Crown in 1833

1835 French zoologist Félix Dujardin identifies protoplasm, the viscous translucent substance common to all forms of life

1835 English architect and designer Augustus Welby Pugin plays a major part in the second stage of the Gothic Revival

1834 American novelist William Gilmore Simms publishes Guy Rivers, the first of his series known as the Border Romances

1834 In London a great fire destroys most of the Palace of Westminster, including the two houses of parliament

1834 William IV invites the Tory leader Robert Peel to form a government in place of the Whigs

1834 Prime minister Lord Melbourne has diffculties in holding his government together and is dismissed by William IV

1834 Alexander Pushkin publishes his best-known short story, The Queen of Spades

1834 Lord Melbourne becomes Britain's prime minister, at the head of the same Whig administration after the resignation of Earl Grey

1834 The opponents of US president Andrew Jackson, mockingly called King Andrew, become known as the Whig party

1834 Pedro IV removes his usurping brother Dom Miguel from the Portuguese throne and restores it to his daughter, Maria II

1834 Six farm labourers, from Tolpuddle in Dorset, are transported for seven years to Australia for administering unlawful oaths in the forming of a union

1834 St John's, originally a daughter-chapel of St Mary's Hampton, is declared an independent parish and the chapel is given the status of a Church

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1834 The Tories in Britain adopt a reassuring name for an uncertain future – Conservatives

1833 The first long-distance US railway, in South Carolina, carries its first passengers

1833 Edward Collins buys the Richmond Friary Site, stretching to the river Thames and St Helena Wharf

1833 Hector Berlioz marries an Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, with whom he has been obsessed since seeing her play Ophelia and Juliet in 1827

1833 Alexander Pushkin publishes a novel in verse, Eugene Onegin

1833 Benjamin Henry Day establishes a new penny daily in New York, the Sun, which lasts until 1966

1833 Pugin marries his second wife, Louisa Burton

1833 Under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison a society is formed in the USA calling for the immediate abolition of slavery

1833 Antonio López de Santa Anna begins the first of five spells as president of Mexico

1833 Civil war breaks out in Spain between supporters of Ferdinand VII's three-year-old daughter, Isabella II, and of his brother Don Carlos

1833 Britain ejects the Argentinians from the Falklands and begins the process of settlement with British farmers

1833 30-year-old Robert Stephenson is appointed chief engineer to the London and Birmingham railway

1833 27-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel wins his first major appointment, as chief engineer to the Great Western railway

1832 Britain suffers first cholera epidemic

1832 20-year-old English artist Edward Lear publishes Family of the Psittacidae, a collection of his paintings of parrots

1832 French painter Eugène Delacroix begins a five-month visit to north Africa, with profound effects on his future art

1832 The paddle steamer Alburkah becomes the first ocean-going iron ship, completing the journey from England to the Niger

1832 Mendelssohn's concert overture The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave) has its premiere in London's Covent Garden

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1832 Napoleon's son, known now as the Duke of Reichstadt, dies of tuberculosis in Vienna

1832 The USA suffers the first of several cholera epidemics, spanning the sixty years to 1892

1832 Greece wins independence, with the 17-year-old Otto of Bavaria as king

1832 After several rejections by Britain's House of Lords, the Reform Bill finally passes and receives royal assent

1832 English author Frances Trollope ruffles transatlantic feathers with her Domestic Manners of the Americans, based on a 3-year stay

1832 Robert Schumann's first published composition is Papillons ('Butterflies'), twelve short dance pieces for piano

1832 Gaetano Donizetti's opera L'elisir d'amore has its premiere in Milan

1832 The Göta canal is completed, enabling ships to cross Scandinavia from the North Sea to the Baltic

1832 English mathematician Charles Babbage builds a sophisticated calculating machine, which he calls a 'difference engine'

1832 The full text of Goethe's Faust, Parts 1 and 2, is published a few months after the poet's death

1832 English scientist Michael Faraday reports his discovery of the first law of electrolysis, to be followed a year later by the second

1831 Edmund Kean takes a lease on the theatre and acts here until his death in 1833

1831 HMS Beagle sails from Plymouth to survey the coasts of the southern hemisphere, with Charles Darwin as the expedition's naturalist

1831 The Church of St John's, dedicated to St John the Baptist and designed by Edward Lapidge, is completed in Hampton Wick

1831 Russian poet Alexander Pushkin publishes a grand historical drama, Boris Godunov

1831 Evangelical preacher Charles Grandison Finney leads a new wave of revivalism in the northeastern states

1831 Nat Turner leads a revolt by fellow slaves in Southampton County, Virginia, killing 59 whites and provoking more repressive legislation

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1831 Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem The Last Leaf is inspired by an aged survivor of the Boston Tea Party

1831 Pugin marries Anne Garnett, who dies the following year after giving birth to a daughter, also called Anne

1831 Samuel Francis Smith's patriotic hymn America is sung for the first time on July 4 in Boston

1831 Pedro I abdicates in Brazil and returns to Europe to recover his Portuguese throne (as Pedro IV)

1831 Victor Hugo publishes his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the hunchback, Quasimodo, is obsessed with Esmeralda

1831 The first Whig Reform Bill is carried in the British House of Commons by a single vote

1831 New St Mary's Church opens, designed by Edward Lapidge, in white brick with stone dressings in Gothic revival style and with sqare pinnacled tower at the west end

1831 The last surviving Aborigines of Tasmania are moved by the British to a small island where they soon die out

1831 Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini founds Young Italy, an organization to promote insurrection

1831 Mameluke power ends with their suppression in Baghdad, following a massacre in Cairo twenty years earlier

1831 Old Sarum, the most notorious of Britain's rotten boroughs, has just seven voters but returns two members to parliament

1831 Old London Bridge is demolished after more than six centuries, ending the chance of frost fairs on the Thames

1830 The Symphonie fantastique by French composer Hector Berlioz has its premiere in Paris

1830 George Stephenson's railway between Liverpool and Manchester opens, with passengers pulled by eight locomotives based on Rocket

1830 Panama becomes part of the newly independent rebublic of Colombia

1830 Diego Portales begins a 30-year spell as Chile's conservative dictator

1830 The Book of Mormon, translated from miraculously discovered holy tablets, is

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published by their finder Joseph Smith

1830 French author Stendhal publishes his novel Le Rouge et Le Noir ('The Red and the Black')

1830 Congress passes the Indian Removal Act, to push the American Indian tribes west of the Mississippi

1830 A French army invades Algeria, beginning the process which brings the region within the French empire

1830 Milosh Obrenovich wins recognition for an autonomous Serbia, with himself as prince

1830 Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King, is welcomed in Paris in a new role – as 'king of the French, by the will of the people'

1830 A revolution erupts in Paris in July and sweeps Charles X from the throne

1830 Sucre is assassinated on his journey home to Quito from a congress in Bogotá

1830 Bolívar resigns as president of Gran Colombia shortly before dying of tuberculosis

1830 Hokusai begins to publish his famous colour-printed views of Mount Fuji

1830 Earl Grey becomes British prime minister at the head of a Whig government committed to reform

1830 Richard Lander and his brother John explore the lower reaches of the Niger, proving that the great river is navigable

1830 Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem 'Old Ironsides' prompts a public response that saves the frigate from the scrapyard

1830 A network of undercover abolitionists in the southern states of America help slaves escape to freedom in the north

1830 The death of the last infant cousin senior to her in the royal succession makes Victoria heir to the British throne

1830 Victor Hugo's romantic drama Hernani provokes a riot in the Paris audience on the first night

1830 William IV succeeds his brother George IV as the British king

1829-1830 Old St Mary's Church is demolished but many monuments are transferred to a new Church on the same site and the vaults continue to be used under the new building

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1829 The locomotive Rocket, built by George and Robert Stephenson, defeats two rivals in the Rainhill trials, near Liverpool

1829 Oxford and Cambridge compete against each other in the first university boat race, held at Henley

1829 German composer Felix Mendelssohn visits the Hebrides and see's Fingal's Cave, later the theme of his Hebrides Overture

1829 Pugin joins the staff of Covent Garden as a scene painter, but is soon designing sets and costumes

1829 Gioacchino Rossini's opera William Tell has its premiere in Paris

1829 The state government of Georgia declares that it is illegal for for the Cherokees to hold political assemblies

1829 The Emancipation Act, enabling Daniel O'Connell to take his seat at Westminster, at last removes the restrictions on Catholics in UK public life

1829 20-year-old Edgar Allan Poe publishes Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems

1829 The Metropolitan Police, set up in London by Robert Peel, become known as 'bobbies' from his first name

1829 James Stirling explores up the Swan River in western Australia to find a site for the settlement which he names Perth

1829 After a century of neglect, the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducts an influential revival in Berlin of J.S. Bach's St Matthew Passion

1828 William Burke and William Hare murder 16 victims and sell their bodies to the Edinburgh Medical School for anatomical study

1828 Andrew Jackson, elected president of the USA, introduces the era known as Jacksonian democracy

1828 Adult white males now have the vote in almost all the states of the USA

1828 The Cherokees adopt an American-style constitution and publish the first American- Indian newspaper

1828 The independence of Uruguay is agreed in the Treaty of Montevideo between Brazil and Argentina

1828 Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell wins a sensational by-election victory to join the Westminster parliament

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1828 Connecticut lexicographer Noah Webster publishes the definitive 2-volume scholarly edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language

1828 Conservative 'bigwigs' and liberal 'novices' emerge as Chile's two main political parties

1828 After little more than two years of quarrelsome existence, Robert Owen's community at New Harmony comes to an end

1828 Dom Miguel betrays his allegiance to his brother Pedro IV and usurps the Portuguese throne in a bloodless coup

1828 The new Kingston Bridge is opened by the Duchess of Clarence on 17 July 1828 and the new approach road is named Clarence Street in her honour

1828 Shaka is murdered by his half-brother Dingaan, who becomes leader of the Zulu in his place

1828 Dom Miguel swears allegiance to his brother, the Portuguese king Pedro IV, and becomes regent

1828 The Duke of Wellington becomes British prime minister, heading the Tory government at a time when reform is urgently needed

1827 English artist Samuel Palmer moves to Shoreham, in Kent, for the most inspired years of his career

1827-31 William Cobbett engages in experimental farming methods on the Barn Elms farm, and the publicity generated by his activities causes it to become known as Cobbett’s Farm

1827 London's first suspension bridge opens at Hammersmith

1827 With Kaaterskill Falls 26-year-old Thomas Cole pioneers a heroic tradition in US landscape painting

1827 William Cobbett leases the Home Farm of the Barn Elms estate

1827 German physicist Georg Simon Ohm formulates his law about the proportionality of current flowing in an electric conductor

1827 Britain, France and Russia, supporting Greek independence, defeat the Turkish and Egyptian fleets at Navarino

1827 The 15-year-old Pugin designs furniture, still in place today, for royal apartments in Windsor Castle

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1827 George Canning becomes the British prime minister, but dies five months later

1827 Lavalleja defeats a Brazilian army at Ituzaingó, in the decisive battle for Uruguayan independence

1827 The Turkish governor of Algiers, flicking at the French consul with his fly whisk, finds that he has provoked a French blockade and eventually invasion

1826 Scottish engineer Thomas Telford completes two suspension bridges in Wales, at Conwy and over the Menai Strait

1826-7 J.M.W. Turner paints two views of the terrace at Mortlake belonging to the Limes, for its owner William Moffatt

1826 In James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Natty Bumppo sides with a Mohican chief

1826 Carl Maria von Weber's opera Oberon has its premiere (in London, at Covent Garden)

1826 17-year-old Felix Mendelssohn composes an overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, amplifed with huge success eighteen years later

1826 Bolívar attempts to create a pan-American gathering in the Congress of Panama

1826 June 19 Turner sells Sandycombe Lodge after his father moves to Turner's central London house in Queen Anne Street. The buyer is Joseph Todd, a retired haberdasher of Clapham, who pays £500.

1826 Pedro I, emperor of Brazil, inherits the throne of Portugal (as Pedro IV) but continues to rule from Brazil

1825 A December uprising in St Petersburg ends when troops fire on the crowd, but the 'Decembrists' become revolutionary martyrs

1825 The English socialist Robert Owen purchases New Harmony from the Rappists, to test his utopian theories in a new context

1825 Work begins on the 363-mile Erie Canal that will link the Hudson River to Lake Erie

1825 Active (later called Locomotion) is the engine on the first passenger railway, between Stockton and Darlington

1825 Franz Schubert composes his 'Great' C major symphony (previously often attributed to 1828)

1825 Upper Peru declares independence as the republic of Bolivia, in honour of Simón

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Bolívar

1825 The elderly Francisco de Goya becomes the first great artist to attempt lithography

1825 Italian author Alessandro Manzoni begins publication (completed 1827) of his novel I Promessi Sposi ('The Betrothed')

1825 Juan Antonio Lavalleja leads a band of Thirty-three Immortals in Uruguay's fight for independence from Brazil

1825-1828 An act of 1825 authorises the building of a new Kingston Bridge, fifty yards upstream, which is designed by Edward Lapidge

1825 With a victory at Tumusla Antonio José de Sucre liberates Upper Peru (the future Bolivia), the last Spanish stronghold in continental America

1825 The Joint-Stock Companies Act introduces regulations to protect investors in Britain

1825 Jonathan Peel, younger brother of Sir Robert Peel, buys Marble Hill. He lives here until his death in 1879 and his widow stays on until her death in 1887.

1825 Plans are made for a horse-drawn railroad into the East India Docks, but it is not built

1824 12-year-old Charles Dickens works in London in Warren's boot-blacking factory

1824 The Cambridge Park estate is divided and Meadowbank is built in the southern part.

1824 George IV lays the foundation stone for a school on the north east side of Kew Green and gives £300 on condition that the school be called the King’s Free School. Later Queen Victoria permits the school to be called The Queen’s School.

1824 After the surrender of the Spanish army to Antonio José de Sucre at Ayacucho, Peru is finally liberated

1824 Leading only one half of the ruling Republican party, John Quincy Adams wins the US presidential election

1824 The reactionary Charles X succeeds to the throne of France on the death of his brother Louis XVIII

1824 The King’s Free School is established in a small Gothic building near the pond, with George IV as a major subscriber

1824 Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini moves to Paris, where he becomes director of the Théatre Italien

1824 Beethoven's ninth symphony (the Choral, because of its finale, setting Schiller's

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Ode to Joy) has its first performance in Vienna

1824 Lord Byron dies of a fever in Greece, in Missolonghi, at the age of thirty-six

1824 The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, outlawing trade unions in Britain, are repealed

1824 The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is set up within the US War Department

1824 The Republican party in the USA splits into National Republicans and Democratic Republicans

1824 The Portuguese prince Dom Miguel briefly topples his father, John VI, from the throne

1823 By an Act of Parliament George IV encloses the western end of Kew Green up to the present Ferry Lane and closes the road across the Green.

1823 US president James Monroe warns European nations against interfering in America, in the policy which becomes known as the Monroe Doctrine

1823 Bolívar arrives in Lima to be granted command of the army and dictatorial powers in the republic of Peru

1823 With the help of an army from France, the Spanish king Ferdinand VII is freed from confinement and restored to his throne

1823 An American poem, A Visit from St Nicholas, describes in every detail the modern Santa Claus

1823 James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers introduces Natty Bumppo, frontiersman known for his 'leather stockings'

1823 A heavenly being appears to Joseph Smith in New York state – an event which launches the Mormon church

1823 A Rugby schoolboy, William Webb Ellis, picks up the football and runs with it in rugby union's founding myth

1823 Austrian composer Franz Schubert writes the song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin ('The beautiful miller's wife')

1823 12-year-old Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt wins a reputation as a virtuoso performer

1823 After the death of Eva Garrick, David Garrick's widow, in 1822 the contents of Garrick's Villa are auctioned and the Roubiliac statue from the Temple goes to the British Museum

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1823 Daniel O'Connell organizes Catholic Associations throughout Ireland, funded by the members' penny subscriptions

1823 Guatemala declares independence following the example of neighbouring Mexico

1823 Lord Byron arrives in Greece to support the cause of Greek independence

1823 Bernardo O'Higgins, Chile's first liberal reformer, is so unpopular that he has to resign

1822 Austrian composer Franz Schubert begins, but never completes, the great work now known as his 'Unifinished' symphony (no 8.in B minor)

1822 The first shipload of freed slaves reaches Cape Mesurado (in the region soon called Liberia) from the USA

1822 The Portuguese regent, Dom Pedro, proclaims the independence of Brazil and three months later is crowned emperor, as Pedro I

1822 After failing to agree with Bolívar at Guayaquil, San Martín resigns his post as Protector of Peru

1822 The two liberators, Bolívar and San Martín, meet in Guayaquil for a conference

1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns when sailing in the gulf of Spezia, in northwest Italy, at the age of 29

1822 Walter Scott begins to transform Abbotsford into a romantic house that he refers to as his 'conundrum castle'

1822 Mzilikazi, after a quarrel with Shaka, leads the Ndebele people to new territories west of Natal

1822 French physicist Augustin Jean Fresnel develops a more efficient form of lens for use in lighthouses

1822 Under Joseph Ellis the Star and Garter hotel expands still further to become the f ashionable watering place for royalty and literary figures, including later in the century Dickens and Thackeray

1822 George IV wears a tartan kilt when visiting Edinburgh, and launches a new craze for Highland dress

1822 Agustin de Iturbide declares himself emperor of the new nation of Mexico, as Agustin I

1822 After defeating the Spanish at Pichincha, Antonio José de Sucre enters Quito and liberates Ecuador

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1822 George Canning becomes the British foreign secretary for the second time, in Lord Liverpool's government

1822 Egyptian hieroglyphs are deciphered by French Egyptologist Jean François Champollion, using the Rosetta stone

1821 Stephen Austin begins the process of American settlement in the Mexican province of Texas

1821 The American Colonization Society buys the area later known as Liberia to settle freed slaves

1821 Edmund Kean gives his snuff box to an admirer, as a souvenir of his Richard III

1821 The Cortes in Lisbon passes a liberal constitution which they persuade the king, John VI, to accept

1821 The Sante Fe Trail, from Missouri to New Mexico, is opened up by the US trader William Becknell

1821 The Saturday Evening Post is launched in Philadelphia as a weekly to provide light Sunday reading

1821 The spoken language of the Cherokee Indians is captured in written form – an achievement traditionally attributed to Sequoyah

1821 The Shaker settlements, now widespread in the US, form The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing

1821 During his coronation George IV has the doors of Westminster Abbey closed against his queen, Caroline

1821 A reactionary movement led by Agustín de Iturbide wins new and lasting independence for Mexico

1821 English author William Hazlitt publishes Table Talk, a two-volume collection that includes most of his best-known essays

1821 Bolívar defeats the Spanish at Carabobo and liberates, for the second time, his native city of Caracas

1821 San Martín enters Lima and proclaims Peruvian independence with himself as 'Protector'

1821 Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischutz has its premiere in Berlin

1821 French physicist Augustin Jean Fresnel publishes the theory that light is a

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transverse wave, thus explaining polarization effects

1821 The Spy, a romance set in the American Revolution, establishes the reputation of US author James Fenimore Cooper

1821 English radical William Cobbett begins his journeys round England, published in 1830 as Rural Rides

1821 English poet John Keats dies in Rome at the age of twenty-five

1821 The merged Hudson's Bay Company now administers a territory stretching from the Great Lakes to the Pacific

1821 Napoleon dies on St Helena, after six years of captivity

1821 The British government imposes a merger on two great squabbling enterprises in Canada, the North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company

1821 English author Thomas De Quincey publishes his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

1821 An uprising in Greece against Turkish rule is followed by the massacre of several thousand Muslims

1821 The 22-year-old Portuguese prince, Dom Pedro, is made regent of Brazil

1821 An Egyptian army makes its camp at Khartoum, subsequently the capital of an Egyptian province in the Sudan

1820 English painter John Constable acquires a house in Hampstead, a region of London that features frequently in his work

1820 French painter Théodore Géricault begins a two-year visit to Britain

1820 The first of the truces is made which will lead to the Trucial States, now known as the United Arab Emirates

1820 Russian poet Alexander Pushkin publishes his first long poem, Ruslan and Ludmilla

1820 The first big influx of British settlers, numbering some 5000, arrives at Cape Town in South Africa

1820 The newly independent republic of Argentina takes possession of Las Islas Malvinas (the Falklands)

1820 7-year-old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has a poem published in a newspaper in his home town of Portland, Maine

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1820 English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes Ode to the West Wind, written mainly in a wood near Florence

1820 A second liberal revolution in Spain ends with Ferdinand VII a prisoner of the Cortes in Cadiz

1820 The Missouri Compromise, admitting Maine and Missouri to the union, keeps the balance between 'free' and 'slave' states in the US senate

1820 English poet John Keats publishes Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden

1820 French physicist André Marie Ampère begins his researches into the links between electricity and magnetism

1820 The Eastern Question, concerning Turkey's ability to control its vast empire, becomes a persistent nineteenth-century theme

1820 Washington Irving tells the story of the long sleep of Rip Van Winkle in his Sketch Book

1820 The British king George III dies after 59 years on the throne – a longer reign than any of his predecessors

1820 The British king George III dies after 59 years on the throne – a longer reign than any of his predecessors

1819 J.M.W. Turner makes the first of several visits to Venice, and discovers a rich seam of inspiration

1819 Walter Scott publishes Ivanhoe, a tale of love, tournaments and sieges at the time of the crusades

1819 John Rennie completes a cast-iron bridge with the world's longest span, crossing the Thames at Vauxhall

1819 November 22 Mary Anne Evans (known now as George Eliot) is born in the parish of Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire

1819 The United Kingdom formally adopts the gold standard for its currency, after using it on a de facto basis since 1717

1819 Byron begins publication in parts of his longest poem, Don Juan an epic satirical comment on contemporary life

1819 Bolívar marches his army across the Andes, captures Bogotá and proclaims the republic of Gran Colombia

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1819 Magistrates order troops to fire on a crowd in Manchester, in what becomes known as the Peterloo massacre

1819 McCulloch v. Maryland defines the tax relationship between the US government and the states

1819 Kew bridge is sold to George Robinson for £22,000

1819 Spain sells Florida to the USA for $5 million, in return for the waiving of any American claim to Texas

1819 William Cobbett brings back to England the bones of Thomas Paine, who died in the USA in 1809

1819 The Sikh maharajah of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, conquers Kashmir, beginning a century and a half of Sikh dominance in the region

1818 Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a Gothic tale about giving life to an artificial man

1818 Two of Jane Austen's novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are published in the year after her death

1818 In The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer develops the bleakest possible view of the effects of the human will

1818 Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, dies and the 'Dutch house' in Kew Gardens is closed.

1818 Thomas Cochrane arrives in Valparaiso to take command of the Chilean navy

1818 The king of Prussia, Frederick William III, makes a bid for German leadership by turning his extensive lands into a custom-free zone (Zollverein)

1818 A leader of the Ismaili sect is granted, by the shah of Persia, the hereditary title of Aga Khan

1818 The first Reform congregation within Judaism is established in Germany, in the ` Hamburg Temple

1818 The 49th parallel is agreed as the frontier between the USA and Canada

1818 Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes probably his best-known poem, the sonnet Ozymandias

1817 John Rennie's new bridge commemorates a recent victory, over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815

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1817 Andrew Jackson, attacking settlements in Spanish Florida, launches the first of three wars against the Seminole Indians

1817 On the death of Princess Charlotte, not one of seven princes has an heir to succeed to the British throne in the next generation

1817 Bernardo O'Higgins introduces liberal reforms in Chile, reducing the privileges of aristocracy and church

1817 Jane Austen dies in Winchester, and is buried in the cathedral

1817 Bolívar returns to Venezuela and builds up an army of liberation in a remote region up the Orinoco

1817 German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer observes and draws dark lines in the solar spectrum

1817 British officers, hoping to shoot a tiger, come across the forgotten Buddhist caves of Ajanta

1817 O'Higgins is elected the 'supreme director' of independent Chile after San Martín declines the post

1817 An informal financial market on Wall Street is transformed into the New York Stock and Exchange Board

1817 San Martín and O'Higgins lead an army through the Andes into Chile and capture Santiago

1817 US poet William Cullen Bryant publishes Thanatopsis, written seven years previously at the age of 16

1816 London's first iron bridge is completed at Vauxhall

1816 Republican candidate James Monroe wins the US presidential election by a wide margin

1816 The British establish Bathurst (now Banjul) at the mouth of the Gambia as a base against the slave trade

1816 The independence of Argentina is formally proclaimed, dropping any pretence of remaining loyal to the Spanish king

1816 René Laënnec, reluctant to press his ear to the chest of a young female patient, finds a solution in the stethoscope

1816 Shaka wins control of the Zulu and begins to build them into a formidable military machine

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1816 Robert Finley, a US anti-slavery campaigner, founds the American Colonization Society to settle freed slaves in Africa

1816 Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville has its premiere in Rome

1816 Henrietta Hotham dies and the Marble Hill estate is sold to Timothy Brent then living at Little Marble Hill. The house subsequently has a number of owners.

1815 Napoleon is sent to a more secure place of exile, the rocky Atlantic island of St Helena

1815 Louis Philippe, Duc D'Orléans rents during his exile the house in Twickenham that becomes known as Orleans House.

1815 Jacques-Louis David, unmistakably identified as Napoleon's painter, is banished from France after the fall of the emperor and moves to Brussels

1815 English architect John Nash designs the exotic Royal Pavilion in Brighton for the Prince Regent

1815 Wellington is presented with a twice-life-size nude marble statue, by Canova, of his vanquished enemy Napoleon

1815 The Spanish recover Bogotá yet again and Bolívar flees into exile in Jamaica

1815 The Spanish suppress the independence movement in Mexico with the capture and execution of its leader, Jose Maria Morelos

1815 The congress of Vienna leaves the Cape of Good Hope in British hands

1815 Poland becomes a kingdom of very limited independence, since the Russian tsar Alexander I is to be its king

1815 Napoleon, held on a British warship off Torquay and hoping now to live in Britain, becomes an instant tourist attraction

1815 The congress of Vienna establishes a Confederation of the German States, now reduced in number to thirty-five

1815 The rulers of Russia, Prussia and Austria form a Holy Alliance to preserve their concept of a Christian Europe

1815 The first news of the victory at Waterloo is given to the British government by a private citizen, Nathan Mayer Rothschild

1815 The English and Prussian generals Wellington and Blücher defeat Napoleon in a closely fought battle at Waterloo

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1815 Brazil is given equal standing with Portugal, forming together the Kingdom of Portugal and Brazil

1815 Scottish engineer John McAdam builds the first macadamized road, in the Bristol region of southwest England

1815 Napoleon reaches Paris, already accompanied by an enthusiastic regiment that has joined him on his journey north

1815 Napoleon slips away from Elba with a fleet of small vessels and lands on the coast of France

1815 American volunteers under Andrew Jackson defeat British regulars near New Orleans, two weeks after peace has been agreed at Ghent

1815 English chemist Humphry Davy invents a safety lamp that shields the naked flame and prevents explosions in mines

1814 Britain and the United States sign the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812

1814 The Custom House burns, just upstream of the Tower of London

1814 The Rappists establish a second American community, this time in Indiana, calling it New Harmony

1814 US lawyer Francis Scott Key writes The Star-Spangled Banner after seeing the British bombard Fort McHenry

1814 British forces enter Washington, burning the Capitol and the president's new house

1814 The Times, England's oldest daily newspaper, becomes the first to print on a steam press

1814 The Jesuit Order is restored by Pius VII on his return to Rome

1814 Robert Peel, chief secretary for Ireland, introduces a police force soon known as the 'Peelers'

1814 The crowned heads of Europe and their representatives gather in Vienna to tidy up the post-Napoleonic continent

1814 Bolívar recaptures Bogotá from the recently returned Spanish troops

1814 Spanish forces at Rancagua defeat a Chilean army commanded by Bernardo O'Higgins, who escapes across the Andes into Argentina

1814 The Spanish recapture Caracas, after which Bolívar moves southwest to advance

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on Bogotá, now held again by the Spanish

1814 Napoleon goes into exile on the island of Elba, which he immediately treats as a miniature state in need of improvement

1814 Napoleon's first empress, Josephine, dies near Paris

1814 The final version of Beethoven's opera Fidelio has its premiere in Vienna

1814 Beethoven's Mass in D (the Missa Solemnis) has its first performance in Vienna, though still incomplete

1814 Ferdinand VII, restored to Spain, imposes a reactionary regime and persecutes his liberal opponents

1814 English engineer George Stephenson builds his first locomotive, the Blucher, and runs it at the Killingworth colliery

1814 Napoleon abdicates at Fontainebleau and the French senate invites Louis XVIII to return to reclaim his throne

1814 Francia becomes dictator of Paraguay and for the next 26 years seals his nation off from the rest of the world

1814 The Russian emperor and the Prussian king take a salute in the Champs Elysées after the allies capture Paris

1814 A cold February freezes the Thames and makes possible the last of London's famous frost fairs

1814 José San Martín becomes commander of the patriot army of Argentina, replacing Manuel Belgrano

1814 Denmark cedes Norway to Sweden, in the Treaty of Kiel, following Bernadotte's successful Danish campaign

1813 A copper beech is planted in the garden of Asgill House, which survives into the twenty-first century in good health and at a magnificent size

1813 Pride and Prejudice, based on a youthful work of 1797 called First Impressions, is the second of Jane Austen's novels to be published

1813 The allies inflict a heavy defeat on Napoleon at Leipzig, in the so-called Battle of the Nations

1813 Wellington crosses the Bidassoa river in the north of Spain, bringing an enemy army on to French soil for the first time in twenty years

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1813 Tecumseh is killed fighting for the British against General Harrison east of Detroit in the Battle of the Thames

1813 The head of the house of Orange becomes, for the first time, the sovereign prince of the Netherlands

1813 Rebels meeting for a conference in Chilpancingo proclaim a short-lived Mexican independence

1813 American warships win a victory over the British on Lake Erie, strengthening the US presence in the Great Lakes

1813 The nickname Uncle Sam, supposedly based on the initials US, has its first recorded use in an issue of the Troy Post

1813 Bolívar defeats the Spanish forces in Venezuela and is welcomed in Caracas as the Liberator

1813 In a treaty with Russia and Prussia at Reichenbach, Austria agrees to declare war on France

1813 Quaker philanthopist Elizabeth Fry, appalled by the condition of female prisoners in London's Newgate gaol, begins campaigning on their behalf

1813 Wellington defeats Napoleon's brother Joseph at Vitoria, and captures his valuable baggage train

1813 The Turks recapture Belgrade and sell thousands of Serb women and children into slavery

1813 American forces push north into Canada and enter York (the modern Toronto), burning the parliament buildings and archives

1813 The king of Prussia, Frederick William III, changes sides and declares war on France

1813 Simon Bolívar publishes the Manisfesto de Cartagena, calling on the citizens of New Granada to unite and expel the Spaniards

1813 William Hedley's Puffing Billy, the first steam locomotive running on smooth rails, goes to work at Wylam colliery

1812 Napoleon arrives back in Paris ahead of the remains of his army, after losing half a million men in the Russian campaign

1812 Napoleon begins the retreat from Moscow, in arctic conditions and harried by guerrilla attacks

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1812 The first two cantos are published of Byron's largely autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, bringing him immediate fame

1812 After victory at Borodino, Napoleon enters Moscow to find the city abandoned and burning

1812 The Russian army under Marshal Kutuzov confronts the advancing French at Borodino, and though defeated makes a successful withdrawal

1812 The US frigate Constitution, affectionately known as 'Old Ironsides', wins successes against British warships in the Atlantic

1812 The British capture Detroit in an early engagement of the War of 1812

1812 The Spanish Cortes in Cadiz produces a strikingly liberal new constitution for Spain

1812 The Spanish authorities recover control of Venezuela, ending the region's first brief spell of independence

1812 Damage to US trade by British orders in council prompts war (the War of 1812) between the two nations

1812 The French author Stendhal serves in the French army during the invasion of Russia

1812 Napoleon launches an attack on his ally, the Russian tsar Alexander I, with an army of more than 600,000 men

1812 After the death of Perceval, Lord Liverpool begins a 15-year spell as Britain's prime minister

1812 The British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, is assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham

1812 Britain's first primary school is established by Robert Owen at New Lanark in Scotland

1812 Lord Castlereagh becomes British foreign secretary in Spencer Perceval's government

1812 Augustus Welby Pugin is born in London, the son of the architectural illustrator Augustus Charles Pugin

1812 French scientist Georges Cuvier introduces scientific palaeontology with his Research on the Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds

1812 Turner completes the building of his villa. Initially called Solus Lodge, the name is changed to Sandycombe Lodge a year later.

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1812 Today's Drury Lane Theatre opens

1811 An American army attacks and destroys Tecumseh's base at Prophetstown

1811 Dora Jordan is forced to leave Bushy House after being abandoned by her royal lover, the Duke of Clarence

1811 The colonists of Paraguay throw out their Spanish governor and declare independence

1811 The citizens of Bogotá declare the independence of the province of Colombia

1811 Mortlake’s two small breweries merge as a single business

1811 John Jacob Astor establishes Astoria, a settlement on the Pacific coast to develop his fur trade with China

1811 Masked Luddites smash machinery in night raids on factories in Nottingham

1811 English author Jane Austen publishes her first work in print, Sense and Sensibility, at her own expense

1811 Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from Oxford university for circulating a pamphlet with the title The Necessity of Atheism

1811 Italian chemist Amedeo Avogadro publishes a hypothesis, about the number of molecules in gases, that becomes known as Avogadro's Law

1811 All but one of 300 Mameluke guests are assassinated during an entertainment by Muhammad Ali in Cairo

1811 A 12-year-old Dorset child, Mary Anning, discovers at Lyme Regis a 21 ft (6.4m) fossil of an icthyosaur

1811 Marie Louise gives birth to a boy, Napoleon's longed-for heir, to be known as the King of Rome

1811 Work begins at Cumberland in Maryland on the construction of America's National Road

1811 The British king George III, suffering from porphyria, is deemed unfit to govern and his eldest son becomes Prince Regent

1810 Chile begins four years of untroubled independence, ruled by a junta introducing liberal reforms

1810 16-year-old future millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt begins his career by establishing

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a ferry service to Manhattan

1810 The parish priest of Dolores sparks a rebellion against the Spanish authorities in Mexico with his Grito de Dolores

1810 A French marshal, Jean Bernadotte, is offered the position of crown prince and heir to the Swedish throne

1810 The citizens of Bogotá expel the local Spanish officials and declare their loyalty to the deposed Ferdinand VII

1810 Johann Zoffany (1733-1810) is buried in St Anne's churchyard in Kew.

1810 Walter Scott's poem Lady of the Lake brings tourists in unprecedented numbers to Scotland's Loch Katrine

1810 José Gervasio Artigas lays siege to the Spanish forces in Montevideo, beginning Uruguay's long struggle for independence

1810 The Spanish Cortes flees from the renewed French invasion and establishes itself in Cadiz

1810 After a public meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentinians set up an autonomous local government in opposition to Spanish forces

1810 Simón Bolívar, a young officer in Caracas, takes part in a coup which wins control of Venezuela from the Spanish

1810 The reforming party in Spain become known as the Liberales, in the first political use of the term Liberal

1810 Napoleon marries the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise, daughter of the emperor Francis I

1810 Mrs Daymer finds Strawberry Hill too expensive to keep up and relinquishes the estate to the eventual heir, Laura Countess of Waldegrave, the grand-daughter of Horace Walpole's brother Edward.

1809 The destruction of Drury Lane Theatre lights up the night sky

1809 Rival British politicians Lord Castlereagh and George Canning fight a duel in which Canning is wounded

1809 John Moore dies at Corunna but his army escapes from Spain and gets back to England

1809 The Fulani establish a capital at Sokoto, from which they dominate the Hausa kingdoms of northern Nigeria

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1809 Napoleon arranges to have his marriage to Josephine annulled so that he can marry the daughter of an emperor

1809 French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argues in Zoological Philosophy that creatures can inherit acquired characteristics

1809 Napoleon enters Vienna and defeats the Austrians in a battle at nearby Wagram

1809 Napoleon, in response to his excommunication, has pope Pius VII arrested and kept in captivity in northern Italy and then France

1809 In the Treaty of Hamina (or Fredrikshamn), Sweden cedes Finland to Russia as an autonomous grand duchy

1809 French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac shows that when gases combine they do so in simple ratios by volume (later known as his Law of Combining Volumes)

1809 Napoleon annexes the Papal States and is excommunicated by the pope, Pius VII

1809 British commander Arthur Wellesley builds the lines of Torres Vedras, to defend the promontory leading south to Lisbon

1809 Ranjit Singh, maharaja of the Punjab, agrees an eastern boundary between himself and the British in the Treaty of Amritsar

1809 With acts of defiance in Sucre, Bolivia becomes the first American province to rebel against the Spanish authorities

1809 Washington Irving uses the fictional Dutch scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker as the supposed author of his comic History of New York

1809 The Treaty of Fort Wayne is the climax of seven years in which William Henry Harrison has acquired millions of acres from the American Indians

1809 Klemens von Metternich becomes foreign minister to the Austrian emperor Francis II

1809 The British impose the so-called Hottentot Code, protecting Africans at the Cape but also tying them to employers' farms

1808 Baroness Howe demolishes Pope's Villa, earning herself the sobriquet Queen of the Goths, and builds a new house next door. The demolition is recorded by J M W Turner in his painting 'Pope's Villa at Twickenham'.

1808 Republican candidate James Madison wins the US presidential election, defeating Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney

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1808 Beethoven's sixth symphony (the Pastoral) has its first performance in Vienna

1808 The Shakers define their Millennial laws in the Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing

1808 A British army under Arthur Wellesley (later duke of Wellington) defeats the French at Vimeiro, near Lisbon

1808 Russia, after winning much of Finland from Sweden during the previous century, invades again in 1808

1808 The Portuguese royal family and their entourage arrive in Rio de Janeiro

1808 An uprising in Madrid, brutally put down by the French, is vividly depicted by the Spanish painter Goya

1808 The French capture of Madrid provokes a British response and the resulting

1808 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa set up a permanent base in Indiana, calling it Prophetstown

1808 Louis-Napoleon, the future Napoleon III, is born in Paris, the son of Napoleon's brother Louis and of Josephine's daughter Hortense

1808 The German-born US entrepreneur John Jacob Astor establishes the American Fur Company

1808 Napoleon gives the throne of Naples, vacated by his brother Joseph, to Joachim Murat

1808 Napoleon transfers his brother Joseph Bonaparte from the throne of Naples to that of Spain

1808 A French army under Joachim Murat advances on Madrid, causing the Spanish royal family to flee

1808 The British government uses Freetown, in Sierra Leone, as a base in the fight against the slave trade

1807 Baroness Howe acquires Pope's Villa.

1807 Thomas Jefferson puts an embargo on US exports, hoping to damage the economy of France and Britain

1807 English collector Thomas Hope publishes his Greek and Egyptian designs in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration

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1807 George Canning is appointed British foreign secretary in the new administration of the Duke of Portland

1807 US engineer Robert Fulton launches a steamboat, the Clermont, on New York's Hudson river

1807 In Phenomenology of Spirit Friedrich Hegel interprets history as the advance of the human mind, often through thesis, antithesis and synthesis

1807 The Portuguese royal family flees to Brazil on the approach of a French army led by Jean-Andoche Junot

1807 Napoleon launches an invasion of Portugal, increasing the likelihood of a Peninsular War

1807 Anglo-US tensions are heightened by a clash between the frigates Leopard and Chesapeake off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia

1807 Legislation abolishing the slave trade is passed in both Britain and America

1807 Part of Poland is recovered from Prussia to become the grand duchy of Warsaw, a small state dependent upon Napoleon

1807 Napoleon and the Russian tsar Alexander I meet on a raft at Tilsit and set about carving up Europe

1807 A Scottish clergyman, Alexander Forsyth, invents the percussion cap to help in his pursuit of wildfowl

1807 Congress sets up the US Coast Survey to map and chart the country's coastline

1807 J M W Turner, the artist, buys a plot of land in Twickenham. The site is bounded by what are now Sandycombe Road and St Margaret's Road. Turner also buys a separate plot nearby.

1807 English chemist Humphry Davy uses electrolysis to isolate the elements sodium and potassium

1807 To counteract Napoleon's Continental System, Britain passes orders in council penalizing any vessel trading into French-held ports

1806 French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres moves to Rome and lives there for 18 years

1806 Karageorge captures Belgrade and wins a limited independence for Serbia within the Ottoman empire

1806 Napoleon imposes his Continental System, designed to strangle Britain's trade

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1806 Lewis and Clark get back to St Louis with a wealth of information about the unopened west of the continent

1806 The Creole militia of Buenos Aires drive out an English force which has captured the city

1806 Napoleon merges the majority of the German states into a Confederation of the Rhine with himself as its protector

1806 The Carbonari, an Italian group of revolutionaries, make their first appearance in Naples in opposition to French rule

1806 Napoleon announces that Holland is to be a kingdom, with his 28-year-old brother Louis Bonaparte on the throne

1806 Tecumseh's younger brother, Tenskwatawa, becomes known as the Shawnee Prophet

1806 Francis II formally brings to an end the 1000-year-old , to keep it from the clutches of Napoleon

1806 The British recapture the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch

1805 Walter Scott publishes The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the long romantic poem that first brings him fame

1805 Lewis and Clark make their way through the Rockies and reach the Pacific

1805 Lord Castlereagh becomes secretary of state for war in William Pitt's government

1805 The first version of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, is performed in Vienna under the title Leonore

1805 Napoleon enters Vienna and then defeats an Austrian and Russian army at Austerlitz

1805 Horatio Nelson dies on the deck of the Victory after winning the battle of Trafalgar

1805 With advice from Thomas Daniell, Samuel Pepys Cockerell builds himself a house, Sezincote, with a roof line of fanciful Indian domes

1805 The first barge is pulled by a horse along Thomas Telford's cast-iron canal aqueduct, high in the air at Pont Cysyllte

1805 Napoleon has himself crowned king of Italy in the cathedral in Milan

1804 It is estimated that in approximately 1804 the population of the world reached one

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billion

1804 George Rapp and his followers establish a utopian community in Pennsylvania and call it Harmony

1804 Napoleon crowns himself emperor of the French in a magnificent ceremony in Notre Dame

1804 William Blake includes his poem 'Jerusalem' in the Preface to his book Milton

1804 Alexander Hamilton is fatally wounded by a bullet to the head in a duel with his political adversary Aaron Burr

1804 Beethoven changes the dedication of his third symphony on hearing that his hero, Napoleon, has made himself an emperor

1804 The city of is founded on the southern coast of Tasmania

1804 Napoleon has himself proclaimed emperor of France by the Senate

1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off from St Louis to explore up the Missouri river and west to the coast

1804 Richard Trevithick runs the first locomotive on rails, pulling heavy weights a distance of 9 miles (15 km) near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales

1804 Napoleon sends an ill-judged message to royalist opponents when he orders the seizure and execution of the young duke of Enghien

1804 The independence of Haiti from France is proclaimed by a new black ruler calling himself the emperor Jacques I

1803 The USS Philadelphia is captured, with its 300 crew, in the first Barbary War between the US and north African pirate states

1803 At the end of his Partial Pressure paper, John Dalton makes brief mention of his radical theory of differing atomic weights

1803 English chemist John Dalton reads a paper describing his Law of Partial Pressure in gases (discovered in 1801)

1803 In the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson buys from Napoleon nearly a million square miles at a knock-down price, doubling the size of the USA

1803 The uprising by Irish nationalist Robert Emmet ends in disaster when he marches on Dublin with only about 100 men

1803 James Brewer doubles the site and establishes the Star and Garter as a major hotel

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1803 Napoleon assembles an invasion fleet against Britain, where Martello towers are hastily built in preparation

1803 In Marbury v. Madison, a landmark example of judicial review, the US Supreme Court declares an act of Congress to be unconstitutional

1803 The peace of Amiens comes to an abrupt end when Britain declares war again on France

1803 The Frankfurt banker Mayer lends 20 million francs to the Danish government

1803 Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick drives a steam carriage in London, from Holborn to Paddington and back

1803 A horse-drawn railroad opens between Wandsworth and Croydon

1802 King George III has the White House at Kew demolished and instructs James Wyatt to build a castellated palace by the river, which was never completed.

1802 The family of John Henry Newman (later Cardinal Newman) move to Grove House (now Grey Court House), where they stay for five years

1802 The Constitution of the Year XII (the twelfth year of the French Revolutionary Calendar) makes Napoleon First Consul for life

1802 English journalist William Cobbett launches a weekly newspaper, The Political Register, that he continues till his death in 1835

1802 The Treaty of Amiens restores the Cape of Good Hope to the Netherlands

1802 At Heiligenstadt, near Vienna, Beethoven writes a letter, to be read only after his death, confronting the tragedy of his inexorable decline into deafness

1802 Josephine's daughter, Hortense de Beauharnais, marries Napoleon's brother Louis Bonaparte

1802 The treaty agreed at Amiens between France and Britain brings a welcome lull after ten years of warfare in Europe

1802 A steam tug designed by William Symington, the Charlotte Dundas, goes into service on the Forth and Clyde canal

1802 Toussaint L'Ouverture is treacherously arrested and sent to France, where he dies in prison

1802 The British parliament passes the first Factory Act, limiting a child's working day in a

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factory to twelve hours

1801 Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (in 1800) is the first of several paintings by Jacques- Louis David celebrating the future emperor

1801 A powerful French force arrives in Saint-Domingue and recovers control of the colony, offering generous terms to the native leaders

1801 The first census of the United Kingdom reveals that the population numbers approximately 9 million

1801 Both France and Britain, engaged against each other in the Napoleonic Wars, take the first census of their populations

1801 Napoleon mends France's fences with Roman Catholicism by agreeing a Concordat with Pope Pius VII

1801 Horatio Nelson puts his telescope to his blind eye when the signal is given to withdraw from Copenhagen harbour

1801 British prime minister William Pitt resigns when George III vetoes Catholic emancipation, but is recalled three years later

1801 Toussaint L'Ouverture invades the neighbouring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, and becomes ruler of of the whole island of Hispaniola

1801 The US House of Representatives votes for Jefferson as president, after a dead heat between him and Burr in the Electoral College

1801 The Act of Union comes into effect, linking Ireland with Britain to form the United Kingdom

1800 Nelson and the Hamiltons visit Haydn, who composes a cantata on the Battle of the Nile for Emma Hamilton to sing

1800 Republican Thomas Jefferson and Federalist Aaron Burr have an identical number of Electoral College votes in the US presidential election

1800 Napoleon takes a French army through the Alps before the snows have cleared, and defeats the Austrians at Marengo

1800 Beethoven seeks medical advice for a very alarming condition, an increasing deafness

1800 Welsh industrialist Robert Owen takes charge of a mill at New Lanark and develops it as an experiment in paternalistic socialism

1800 US president John Adams moves into the newly completed White House, named for

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its light grey limestone

1800 The Library of Congress, the US national library in all but name, is founded in Washington

1800 Toussaint L'Ouverture emerges as the leader of Saint-Domingue, ruling without French colonial control

1800 Italian physicist Alessandro Volta describes to the Royal Society in London how his 'pile' of discs can produce electric current

1800 Napoleon appoints a commission to prepare a code of civil law, which becomes known as the Code Napoléon

1800 Telford proposes a bold new London Bridge

1799 The Queen’s Head pub is built in the orchard of John Dee’s house

1799 Napoleon contrives a military coup that ends the Directory and gives him sweeping powers as First Consul

1799 Napoleon abandons his army in Egypt and returns hastily to Paris at a time of great political opportunity

1799 Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, is killed fighting the British at Seringapatam

1799 A Portuguese prince regent, the future John VI, rules on behalf of his deranged mother, Queen Maria

1799 The British parliament passes a Combination Act, classing any association of labourers as a criminal conspiracy

1799 British prime minister William Pitt introduces income tax at 10% to pay for the war against France

1799 English surveyor William Smith compiles a manuscript, Order of the Strata, revealing chronology through fossils in rocks

1799 A Sikh maharajah, Ranjit Singh, captures Lahore and makes it his capital in his campaign to unify the Punjab

1799 In a famous moment of calculated courage Napoleon visits and touches the sick in a plague hospital in Jaffa

1799 Napoleon, in Syria, orders 3000 captured defenders of Jaffa to be killed by bayonet or drowning to save ammunition

1799 Haydn's oratorio The Creation has its first public performance in Vienna, in the

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Burgtheater

1799 The tsar, Paul I, establishes the Russian-American Company with the express purpose of developing Alaska

1799 Napoleon leads a costly, unsuccessful and plague-ridden expedition against the Turkish garrisons in Syria

1799 Napoleon's soldiers discover a black basalt slab, the Rosetta Stone, near the village of Rashid in Egypt

1798 Captain George Vancouver, who discovered Vancouver Island and retired to live in Petersham, is buried in St Peter’s

1798 Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is published in Lyrical Ballads

1798 English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly publish Lyrical Ballads, a milestone in the Romantic movement

1798 Dora gives birth in Bushy House to Mary, the first of seven children of the Duke of Clarence to be born in the house in the following nine years

1798 Controversial Alien and Sedition Acts are passed by the US Congress as emergency measures in response to the perceived threat of war with France

1798 Disaster strikes the French in Egypt when Nelson finds their fleet in Aboukir Bay and destroys it in the Battle of the Nile

1798 The British acquire a foothold in the Persian Gulf by making Oman a protectorate

1798 US author Charles Brockden Brown publishes Wieland, the first of four novels setting Gothic romance in an American context

1798 Irish nationalist Wolfe Tone, convicted of treason for his failed invasion, cuts his throat to cheat the British gallows

1798 The US public is outraged by news of the XYZ Affair, in which the French ask for bribes before being willing to negotiate a treaty

1798 Napoleon's campaign in Egypt begins well with the Battle of the Pyramids, a victory over an Egyptian army

1798 Austrian author Alois Senefelder, experimenting with grease and water on stone, discovers the principles of lithography

1798 British explorer George Bass sails round Tasmania in an open whaleboat, discovering the strait which now bears his name

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1798 Napoleon, with distinguished scientists in his fleet, sails to invade Egypt

1798 After four years in Copenhagen, German artist Caspar David Friedrich makes his life-long home in Dresden

1797 George Gostling II inherits Whitton Park and commisions Humphrey Repton to landscape the grounds.

1797 By the Treaty of Campo Formio the free republic of Venice, created by Napoleon, is handed over to Austrian rule

1797 Napoleon achieves the peace of Campo Formio, by which Austria cedes the Austrian Netherlands and northern Italy to France

1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge says that while writing Kubla Khan he is interrupted by 'a person on business from Porlock'

1797 The king's son, William, Duke of Clarence, becomes Keeper (or Ranger) of Bushy Park and establishes his mistress, the actress Dora Jordan, in Bushy House

1797 On 18 Fructidor (September 4) Napoleon organizes, from a distance, a coup d'étât in Paris on behalf of three of the Directors

1797 Pope Pius VI is seized by a French army in Rome and is taken off to captivity in France

1797 In Venice Napoleon deposes the last of the doges and sets up a provisional democracy

1797 Napoleon marches against Vienna and is only two days from the city when the emperor requests an armistice

1797 Horace Walpole dies and the Strawberry Hill estate is left to his niece, Anne Seymour Damer, a well-known sculptress, for her lifetime.

1796 German physician Samuel Hahnemann coins the term 'homeopathy' and describes this new approach to medicine

1796 Irish nationalist Wolfe Tone sails from France to invade Ireland with a force of 14,000 French soldiers

1796 The election in the USA brings in a Federalist president (John Adams) and a Republican vice-president (Thomas Jefferson)

1796 Napoleon creates in northern Italy the Cisalpine Republic, formed from occupied territores including the papal states of Bologna and Ferrara

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1796 George Washington, resisting pressure for him to accept a third presidential term, delivers a farewell address to guide the nation's future

1796 George Washington selects the Cherokee Indians for an experiment in adaptation to 'civilization'

1796 US author Joel Barlow publishes his mock-heroic poem The Hasty Pudding, inspired by a dish eaten in 1793 in France

1796 French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace publishes his nebular hypothesis, arguing that the planets formed from a mass of incandescent gas

1796 After two rapid victories in north Italy, Napoleon marches on Turin and the king of Sardinia asks for an armistice

1796 Napoleon Bonaparte takes command of the French army of Italy, with astonishingly successful results

1796 In the armistice of Cherasco the king of Sardinia cedes to France his territories of Savoy and Nice

1796 In Berkeley, Gloucestershire, Edward Jenner inoculates a boy with cowpox in the pioneering case of vaccination

1796 Napoleon changes the spelling of his family name from Buonaparte to the more French-seeming Bonaparte

1796 Napoleon marries Josephine de Beauharnais, widow of Alexandre de Beauharnais, guillotined in 1794

1796 York House has various owners and tenants, being bought by Count, later Prince, Starhemberg, Austrian Ambassador who instals a private chapel.

1795 A treaty negotiated by US minister Thomas Pinckney provides a temporary resolution of disputes between Spain and the USA

1795 Poland's neighbours – Russia, Prussia and Austria – are all on hand for the final partition of the kingdom

1795 With the Dutch entering the war on the side of the French, Britain seizes their valuable Cape colony in South Africa

1795 The 26-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte comes to public attention for his part in saving the Convention in Paris from an assault by rebels

1795 A secret Protestant group, the Orange Society, is formed in Co. Armagh to resist Irish nationalism

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1795 After the Fort Greenville concessions, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh emerges as a champion of Indian territorial rights

1795 Thomas Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason, an attack on conventional Christianity

1795 Indian tribes, at peace talks in Fort Greenville, cede much of Ohio to the USA

1795 The Netherlands, forced by invasion into the French camp, is transformed into the Batavian republic

1795 Two extra stars are added to the American flag for Vermont and Kentucky, two new states that have joined since the original union of thirteen

1795 Mungo Park sets off on his first expedition to explore the Niger on behalf of the African Association

1795 Beethoven makes his first public appearance in Vienna as a pianist, playing either his first or second piano concerto

1795 Dutch Boers begin calling themselves , to emphasize that Africa is their native land

1794 William Blake's volume Songs of Innocence and Experience includes his poem 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright'

1794 Virtuoso violinist Nicolo Paganini gives his first public performances, in churches in his native Genoa

1794 George Washington uses military force to assert government authority on rebels in Pennsylvania refusing to pay a federal tax on whisky

1794 Robespierre and his faction go to the guillotine in July, in the final bloodletting of the Terror

1794 In his Science of Knowledge Johann Gottlieb Fichte contrasts the I, or Ego, and its opposing non-I, or non-Ego

1794 Goethe and Schiller become friends, and together create the movement known as Weimar classicism

1794 The treaty agreed by US envoy John Jay restores some degree of friendship between the USA and Britain

1794 French chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier is guillotined for having been involved with tax collection in the ancien régime

1794 Robespierre and St Just succeed in sending Danton and his faction to the guillotine

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in April

1793 Napoleon's soldiers capture Toulon and his artillery fire forces the Anglo-Spanish fleet to withdraw from the harbour

1793 English revolutionary Thomas Paine spends nearly a year in a French prison after opposing the execution of Louis XVI

1793 The Terror begins in republican France, with executions rising to more than 3000 in December

1793 Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave, joins a Spanish force invading the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti)

1793 The French Convention adopts imaginative names for the months in their new republican calendar

1793 Horatio Nelson, with his ship docked in Naples, meets Lady Hamilton, wife of the British envoy

1793 Napoleon is appointed commander of French republican forces besieging royalists, supported by an Anglo-Spanish fleet, in Toulon

1793 The US Congress passes Fugitive Slave Laws, enabling southern slave owners to reclaim escaped slaves in northern states

1793 France becomes the first nation to attempt national conscription, calling up bachelors between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five

1793 25-year-old Charlotte Corday gains access to prominent republican Jean-Paul Marat and stabs him in his bath

1793 George Washington lays the cornerstone for the Congress building on Capitol Hill

1793 Civil war breaks out in Corsica and Napoleon's family flees to France

1793 Rebellion breaks out in the Vendée and a peasant army marches against republican Paris

1793 Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin, enormously speeding up the process of separating cotton fibres from the seeds

1793 Russia and Prussia agree on a second partition of Poland

1793 Lord Buckingham dies and the Marble Hill estate passes to Lady Suffolk's great niece Henrietta Hotham. She lives in the house briefly and then rents it out, living some of the time in Little Marble Hill, a house built in the grounds.

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1793 Britain joins other European nations in war against France, mainly in naval engagements in the West Indies and Atlantic

1793 Louis XVI is guillotined after a majority of just one in the national Convention has voted for death without delay

1792 Beethoven leaves Bonn and goes to Vienna to study composition with Haydn

1792 George III sends Lord Macartney on an embassy to the Chinese emperor Qianlong

1792 The first political parties, Hamilton's Federalists and Jefferson's Republicans, emerge in the USA

1792 The National Convention abolishes royalty in France and establishes the first republic

1792 Alexander Mackenzie reaches the Pacific coast of Canada, becoming the first known person to cross the north American continent

1792 During four September days, thugs are encouraged to massacre some 1400 aristocrats and priests held in Paris prisons

1792 After their success at Valmy, French republican armies overrun much of the Austrian Netherlands

1792 A French revolutionary army defeats the Austrians and Prussians at Valmy, and thus saves Paris from attack

1792 Thomas Paine moves hurriedly to France, to escape a charge of treason in England for opinions expressed in his Rights of Man

1792 English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes a passionately feminist work, A V indication of the Rights of Woman

1792 Charlotte Square in Edinburgh begins to be built to the design of Robert Adam

1792 The Brazilian rebel Tiradentes is beheaded in public in Rio de Janeiro as a warning to would-be revolutionaries

1792 George Washington is unanimously elected for a second term as president of the USA

1792 Scottish painter Henry Raeburn depicts the Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch

1792 A French officer, Rouget de Lisle, writes a stirring anthem for France, soon to be known as the Marseillaise

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1792 In a first demonstration of the gullotine, a highwayman is beheaded in a Paris square

1792 France declares war on the Austrian emperor, an event that plunges Europe into more than 20 years of conflict

1792 The Swedish king Gustavus III is assassinated at a midnight masquerade in Stockholm – an event later dramatized by Verdi

1791 Thomas Paine publishes the first part of The Rights of Man, his reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

1791 London's Albion Mills burn

1791 The first ten amendments to the US Constitution, collectively known as the Bill of Rights, are ratified by the states

1791 Mozart dies, at the age of just 35, leaving his Requiem unfinished

1791 After centuries as a chapel of Kingston, and 22 years in which it shared a parish with Kew, St Peter’s is established as a parish in its own right.

1791 Wolfe Tone is one of the founders in Belfast of the Society of United Irishmen

1791 Mozart's opera The Magic Flute has its premiere in Vienna in a popular theatre run by the librettist, Emanuel Shikaneder

1791 Naval officer George Vancouver sails from Britain on the voyage which will bring him to the northwest coast of America

1791 The Ordnance Survey is founded in Britain, to make detailed maps of the country for military purposes

1791 An Indian raid on an American military camp beside the Maumee river leaves more than 600 US soldiers dead

1791 Stationed at Valence, Napoleon becomes president of the local Jacobin club and makes radical speeches against the nobility and clergy

1791 Louis XVI and his family attempt to flee from Paris to the border but are captured at Varennes

1791 A stranger arrives in Vienna with a mysterious commission for Mozart to write a requiem mass, just months before the composer's death

1791 French inventor Claude Chappe develops a hilltop signalling system, for which he coins the words telegraph and semaphore

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1791 Scottish poet Robert Burns publishes Tam o' Shanter, in which a drunken farmer has an alarming encounter with witches

1791 The Canadian Constitution Act divides Quebec into Upper Canada (today's Ontario) and Lower Canada (today's Quebec)

1791 Under the guidance of Alexander Hamilton the First Bank of the United States is established in Philadelphia

1790 English painter J.M.W. Turner is only 15 when a painting of his, a watercolour, is first exhibited at the Royal Academy

1790 Anglo-Irish politician publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, a blistering attack on recent events across the Channel

1790 The USA becomes the first nation to establish a regular census as a systematic check on the size of the population

1790 The Potomac is chosen as the navigable river on which the new US capital city will be sited

1790 A second fleet arrives in Sydney, bringing more convicts and a regiment, the New South Wales Corps, to keep order

1790 Joseph Haydn sets off for England, where impresario Johann Peter Salomon presents his London symphonies

1790 A second great revivalist movement sweeps northeast America, inspired by the earlier example of Jonathan Edwards

1790 Mozart's opera Così fan Tutte has its premiere in Vienna, in the court theatre of Joseph II

1789 Francisco de Goya is appointed court painter to the new Spanish king, Charles IV

1789 Fletcher Christian leads a mutiny on HMS Bounty against the captain, William Bligh

1789 Parisians force their way into the palace at Versailles and insist on Louis XVI and his royal family accompanying them back to Paris

1789 French doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposes a decapitation machine as a more humane form of capital punishment

1789 US painter and author William Dunlap has great success with his comedy The Father; or, American Shandyism

1789 An excited Paris mob liberates the seven prisoners held in the forbidding fortress of the Bastille

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1789 Robert Tunstall builds a replacement stone bridge at Kew, designed by James Paine. It is opened by King George III driving over ‘with a great concourse of carriages’

1789 The painter Jacques-Louis David sketches the events in the Versailles tennis court

1789 Delegates of the Third Estate swear an oath in a tennis court at Versailles, pledging themselves not to disperse until France has a constitution

1789 Alexander Mackenzie explores by canoe from central Canada through the Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Ocean

1789 The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a slave captured as a child in Africa, becomes a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic

1789 A left-wing political club begins to meet in a Jacobin convent in Paris, thus becoming known as the Jacobins

1789 In his Principles Jeremy Bentham defines 'utility' as that which enhances pleasure and reduces pain

1789 William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page etched and illustrated by himself

1789 A pamphlet published in France by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès asks a challenging question, What is the Third Estate?

1789 Alexander Hamilton becomes secretary of the treasury in the administration of George Washington, whose federalist views he shares

1789 George Washington, unanimously elected first president of the United States, is inaugurated on Wall Street in New York

1789 England's champion pugilist, the Jewish prize-fighter Daniel Mendoza, publishes The Art of Boxing

1788 Spain's affairs are controlled by Manuel de Godoy, lover of the queen, Maria Luisa

1788 The ministers of Louis XVI reluctantly announce that the estates general will meet in 1789, for the first time since 1614

1788 Tiradentes (the 'puller of teeth') leads the first rebellion against Portuguese rule in Brazil

1788 Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) is buried in St Anne's churchyard in Kew.

1788 The constitution of the United States is ratified by the states, but it is immediately

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agreed that amendments will be desirable

1788 Arthur Phillip, selecting a suitable coastal site for the first penal colony in Australia, names the place Sydney Cove

1788 After a journey of eight months from England the First Fleet reaches Australia, anchoring in Botany Bay

1787 Mozart's opera Don Giovanni has its premiere in Prague

1787 The Federalist Papers, in support of the Constitution and mainly written by Alexander Hamilton, begin appearing in New York

1787 Delegates meeting in Philadelphia agree a final draft for a US consitution, to be submitted to the states for ratification

1787 Scottish engineer James Watt devises the governor, the first example of industrial automation

1787 A British ship lands a party of freed slaves as the first modern settlers in Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa

1787 The First Fleet (eleven ships carrying about 750 convicts) leaves Portsmouth for Australia

1787 The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade is founded in London, with a strong Quaker influence

1787 The French finance minister, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, is dismissed when his proposed reforms meet aristocratic opposition

1787 The Continental Congress passes the Northwest Ordinance, a plan for the establishment of new states north and west of the Ohio river

1787 French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier publishes a system for classifying and naming chemical substances

1786 Francisco de Goya is appointed painter to the king of Spain, Charles III

1786 Daniel Shays is the most prominent figure in a violent protest movement by farmers against the government of Massachusetts

1786 US author Philip Freneau publishes his first collection of poems, dating back to 1771

1786 The emperor Joseph II is reported to have told Mozart that his opera The Marriage of Figaro has 'too many notes'

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1786 Mozart's Marriage of Figaro premieres in Vienna and then has a huge success in Prague

1785 French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon crosses the Atlantic to sculpt a statue of George Washington from the life at Mount Vernon

1785 Napoleon graduates from his military college and is commissioned in an artillery regiment

1785 William Withering's Account of the Foxglove describes the use of digitalis for dropsy, and its possible application to heart disease

1785 James Hutton describes to the Royal Society of Edinburgh his studies of local rocks, launching the era of scientific geology

1785 French physicist Charles Augustin de Coulomb begins publishing his discoveries in the field of electricity and magnetism

1785 The French queen Marie Antoinette is wrongly implicated in a scandal involving a diamond necklace

1785 Mozart and his friends perform for Haydn the Mozart quartets inspired by Haydn's 'Russian' quartets (op.33), which on publication are dedicated to him

1784 The first mail coach leaves Bristol for London, introducing a new era of faster transport

1784 English ironmaster Henry Cort patents a process for puddling iron which produces a pure and malleable metal

1784 A 24-year-old, William Pitt the Younger, is appointed Britain's prime minister by George III

1784 Benjamin Franklin, irritated at needing two pairs of spectacles, commissions from a lens-grinder the first bifocals

1783 Jacques-Louis David, establishing a reputation with his severe classical paintings, is elected to the French academy

1783 A hot-air balloon rises from a Paris garden, carrying the first human aeronauts – Pilàtre de Rozier and the marquis d'Arlandes

1783 Louis XVI watches through his telescope the first balloon flight with living passengers – a sheep, a cock and a duck

1783 In the Treaty of Paris, negotiated by Adams, Franklin and Jay, the British government recognizes US independence

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1783 Ten days after the first human ascent in a hot-air balloon the feat is repeated, again in Paris, in a version lifted by hydrogen

1783 20-year-old John Jacob Astor emigrates from Germany to America and sets up in the fur trade

1783 The empress Catherine the Great annexes the Crimean peninsula, giving Russia a presence in the Black Sea

1783 US lexicographer Noah Webster publishes a Spelling Book for American children that eventually will sell more than 60 million copies

1783 Some 40,000 Loyalists flee from British America to the previously French colonies, in particular Nova Scotia

1782 French paper manufacturer Joseph Montgolfier sends a hot-air balloon 3000 feet (1000m) into the air, in front of a crowd in Annonay

1782 12-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven publishes his first composition, Piano Variations on a March by Dressler

1782 The English actress Sarah Siddons, already well known in the province, causes a sensation when she appears in London at Drury Lane

1782 Friedrich von Schiller's youthful and anarchic play The Robbers causes a sensation when performed in Mannheim

1782 Italian sculptor Antonio Canova sets up his studio in Rome and begins producing finely modelled nudes in the Greek style

1782 The Duke of Dorset organizes a cricket match

1781 The British general Charles Cornwallis, isolated at Yorktown, is forced to surrender in the final engagement of the Revolutionary War

1781 The reforming emperor Joseph II emancipates the serfs in the Habsburg territories

1781 Ann Lee leads her Shaker colleagues in a missionary tour of New England lasting two years

1781 German philosopher Immanuel Kant publishes the first of his three 'critiques', The Critique of Pure Reason

1781 US poet Philip Freneau describes in The British Prison Ship the horrors of his experiences as a prisoner

1781 George III makes the 'Dutch house' in Kew Gardens the private home for his family.

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1781 The Bank of North America is established by the Continental Congress to lend money to the fledgling Revolutionary government

1781 Joseph II passes an Edict of Toleration, for the first time allowing Protestant worship in Habsburg territories

1781 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, now 25, leaves Salzburg to settle in Vienna

1781 William Herschel discovers Uranus, the first planet to be found by means of a telescope, and names it the Georgian star

1781 Maryland, ratifies the Articles of Confederation (the last state to do so), completing 'the Confederation of the United States'

1780 Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro is a master of colour woodcuts, often depicting the courtesan district of Edo

1780 Elizabeth, Countess of Pembroke, rents Hill Lodge (formerly the mole catcher’s cottage) from Thomas Hill, the gamekeeper of Richmond Park.

1780 British army officer John André is executed in New York as a spy

1780 The capture of British go-between John André yields proof that US general Benedict Arnold is in the pay of the British

1780 The Taylor family inherit the manor of East Sheen and West Hall, and move into Brick Farm

1780 Six days of riot in London are triggered by Lord George Gordon leading a march to oppose any degree of Catholic emancipation

1780 In developing the Haskalah, the German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn reconciles Judaism and the Enlightenment

1780 An Indian uprising in Spanish Peru is led by a descendant of the Incas, Tupac Amaru II

1779 The Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich is damaged in a fire

1779 U.S.S. Bonhomme Richard, commanded by John Paul Jones, fights H.M.S. Serapis near England's Flamborough Head

1779 The 10-year-old Napoleon is admitted as a student in a military college at Brienne, near Troyes

1779 Samuel Crompton perfects the mule, a machine for spinning that combines the merits of Hargreave's jenny and Arkwright's water frame

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1779 The world's first iron bridge is assembled in a few months across the Severn at Coalbrookdale

1779 tells a committee of the House of Commons that the east coast of Australia is suitable for the transportation of convicted felons

1779 London Bridge at risk from waterworks blaze

1778 15-year-old Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun earns enough from painting portraits to support the rest of her family

1778 Francis Hopkinson's popular ballad The Battle of the Kegs describes an ingenious American threat to the British navy

1778 The British adopt a new policy in the south, landing in Georgia and capturing much of South Carolina

1778 The British rapidly abandon Philadelphia on news of the expected arrival of a French fleet

1778 In Brook Watson and the Shark John Singleton Copley creates the most intensely dramatic of his modern history paintings

1778 The second wooden Hampton Court Bridge, of sturdier construction than the first bridge, opens and is 350 feet long, 18 feet wide, and has ten arches raised on piles

1778 The American naval hero John Paul Jones makes successful raids around the coasts of Britain

1778 France, joining the American colonies in their fight against Britain, sends a large fleet across the Atlantic

1778 Benjamin Franklin persuades the French to sign a Treaty of Alliance, committing France to the US cause

1777 January Richmond Bridge, designed by James Paine and Kenton Couse, opens to traffic (and is now the oldest bridge in London)

1777 Samual Prime inherits Kneller Hall from his father, Sir Samuel Prime, and enlarges the house and estate.

1777 The US Congress agrees the final version of the Articles of Confederation, defining the terms on which states join the Union

1777 The American general Horatio Gates captures the army of General Burgoyne near Saratoga

1777 Richard Brinsley Sheridan's second play, The School for Scandal, is an immediate

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success in London's Drury Lane theatre

1777 George Washington, heavily defeated in a battle at Brandywine, is forced to relinquish Philadelphia to the British

1777 Congress adopts a new flag for independent America – the stars and stripes

1774 April A tontine is launched in Richmond to raise money for the construction of a bridge across the Thames

1776 George Washington defeats the British at Trenton at a psychologically important moment in the course of the war

1776 Scottish economist Adam Smith analyzes the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations

1776 Buenos Aires rather than Asunción is chosen to be capital of the new Spanish viceroyalty of La Plata

1776 Spanish America is now administered as four viceroyalties - New Spain, New Granada, New Peru and La Plata

1776 George Washington, driven from New York by the British, retreats towards Philadelphia

1776 John Hancock is the first delegate to sign the Declaration of Independence, formally written out on a large sheet of parchment

1776 English historian publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

1776 Thomas Jefferson's text for the Declaration of Independence is accepted by the Congress in Philadelphia

1776 Virginia's motion for independence from Britain is passed at the Continental Congress of the colonies with no opposing vote

1776 The revolutionary convention of Virginia votes for independence from Britain, and instructs its delegates in Philadelphia to propose this motion

1776 George Washington drives the British garrison from Boston, and moves south to protect New York

1776 Two Boulton and Watt engines are installed, the first of many in the mines and mills of England's developing industrial revolution

1776 Walpole adds the Beauclerk Tower and hexagonal closet to Strawberry Hill.

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1776 In Common Sense, an anonymous pamphlet, English immigrant Thomas Paine is the first to argue that the American colonies should be independent

1776 George Washington raises on Prospect Hill a new American flag, the British red ensign on a ground of thirteen stripes – one for each colony

1775 Francisco de Goya begins a series of designs for tapestries to be made in Spain's Royal Tapestry Factory

1775 Captain Cook publishes his discovery of a preventive cure against scurvy, in the form of a regular ration of lemon juice

1775 Talleyrand begins an extremely varied career by becoming an abbot at the age of twenty-one

1775 Figaro makes his first appearance on stage in Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville

1775 Yankee Doodle is the most popular song with the patriot troops in the American Revolution

1775 Britain declares the colonies to be in a state of rebellion, and sets up a naval blockade of the American coastline

1775 Delegates to the Continental Congress make a final bid for peace, sending the Olive Branch Petition to George III

1775 At Bunker Hill, overlooking Boston from the north, the American militiamen prove their worth against British professional soldiers

1775 Delegates in Philadelphia select George Washington as commander-in-chief of the colonial army

1775 Delegates from the states reassemble in Philadelphia, with hostilities against the British already under way in Massachusetts

1775 The first shot of the American Revolution is fired in a skirmish between redcoats and militiamen at Lexington, on the road to Concord

1775 Paul Revere is one of the US riders taking an urgent warning to Concord, but he is captured on the journey

1775 General Gage sends a detachment of British troops to seize weapons held by American Patriots at Concord

1775 John Singleton Copley, already established as America's greatest portrait painter, moves to London

1775 Patrick Henry makes a stirring declaration – 'Give me liberty or give me death' – to

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the Virginia Assembly

1775 Pioneer Daniel Boone and other backwoodsmen cut the road west that will bring settlers to Kentucky

1775 Dutch nomads, pressing far north from Cape Town, become known as the Trekboers (voortrekkers)

1774 Thomas Gainsborough moves from Bath to set up a studio in London

1774 Delegates from twelve American colonies meet in Philadelphia and agree not to import any goods from Britain

1774 English chemist Joseph Priestley isolates oxygen, but he believes it to be 'dephlogisticated air'

1774 Illiterate visionary Ann Lee, leader of an English sect, the 'Shaking Quakers', crosses the Atlantic to spread the word

1774 The treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji grants Russia special rights in relation to the Christian Holy Places under Ottoman control

1774 In the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, ending the recent Russo-Turkish war, the Ottoman empire cedes the Crimea to Russia

1774 Encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine emigrates to America and settles in Philadelphia

1774 The Spanish, now in sole occupation of the Falkland Islands, call them Las Islas Malvinas

1774 Britain's new Coercive (or Intolerable) Acts include the requirement that Massachusetts citizens give board and lodging to British troops

1774 Goethe's play Götz von Berlichingen, a definitive work of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), has its premiere in Berlin

1774 Goethe's romantic novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, brings him an immediate European reputation

1774 As a retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, the British parliament closes Boston's port with the first of its Coercive Acts

1773 Responding to pressure from the Catholic monarchs of Europe, Clement XIV abolishes the Jesuit Order

1773 Some fifty colonists, disguised as Indians, tip a valuable cargo of tea into Boston harbour as a protest against British tax

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1773 Samuel Johnson and James Boswell undertake a journey together to the western islands of Scotland

1773 Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele isolates oxygen but does not immediately publish his achievement.

1773 Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer is produced in London's Covent Garden theatre

1773 The London brokers who meet to do business in Jonathan's coffee house decide to call themselves the

1773 English prison reformer John Howard is shocked into action by the conditions he sees in Bedford gaol

1772 Haydn's Farewell Symphony gives a subtle hint to his employer at Esterházy that it is time for the musicians to return home

1772 Captain Cook sets off, in HMS Resolution, on his second voyage to the southern hemisphere

1772 Gustavus III achieves a coup d'état which brings executive power in Sweden back into royal hands

1772 The first partition of Poland begins the process of Lithuania being progressively absorbed into Russia

1772 Russia, Prussia and Austria agree a treaty enabling them to divide the spoils in the first partition of Poland

1771 Richard Arkwright pioneers the factory environment with his cotton mill at Cromford in Derbyshire

1771 English entrepreneur Richard Arkwright adds water power to spinning by means of the water frame

1770 27-year-old Thomas Jefferson begins constructing a mansion on a hilltop in Charlottesville, calling it Monticello ('little mountain')

1770 King George III pays for the church on Kew Green to be greatly enlarged. It is expanded again in 1810 and further additions are made in later years.

1770 In response to American protests, the British government removes the Townshend duties on all commodities with the exception of tea

1770 Captain Cook reaches the mainland of Australia, at a place which he names Botany Bay, and continues up the eastern coast

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1770 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, later hailed as a significant poet, commits suicide in a London garret

1770 British troops fire into an unruly crowd in Boston, Massachusetts, killing five

1770 Walpole adds the Great North Bedchamber to Strawberry Hill.

1770 The triangular trade, controlled from Liverpool, ships millions of Africans across the Atlantic as slaves

1769 Robert Mylne completes his new bridge at Blackfriars

1769 French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot successfully tests a steam wagon, probably the first working mechanical vehicle

1769 Captain Cook reaches New Zealand and sets off to chart its entire coastline

1769 Napoleon Bonaparte is born a French citizen in Ajaccio, in Corsica, the son of a local lawyer

1769 Captain Cook observes in Tahiti the transit of Venus, the primary purpose of his voyage to the Pacific

1769 Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra begins work at San Diego de Cala, the first of his nine California missions

1769 Captain Cook's distinguished passengers, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, collect valuable specimens of Pacific flora

1768 The Royal Academy is established in London, with Joshua Reynolds as its first president

1768 A border incident at Balta, in the southern Ukraine, sparks a war between Russia and Turkey that will last six years

1768 Corsica is sold to France by the republic of Genoa

1768 A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland begins publication of the immensely successful Encyclopaedia Britannica

1768 A French artist, Jean Baptiste le Prince, discovers the aquatint technique in printmaking

1768 Captain James Cook sails from Plymouth, in England, heading for Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus

1767 The British Chancellor, Charles Townshend, passes a series of acts taxing all glass,

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lead, paint, paper and tea imported into the American colonies

1767 Work begins on Edinburgh's New Town, to the design of the 23-year-old architect James Craig

1767 Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon complete a four-year survey to establish the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland

1767 Lady Suffolk dies and the Marble Hill estate passes to her nephew the Earl of Buckinghamshire. He lives occasionally in the house but also rents it out.

1766 George Gostling buys Whitton Park, converts the greenhouse to a mansion and divides the estate, selling or leasing Whitton Place.

1766 Pierre le Roy's chronometer, as accurate as Harrison's and cheaper to construct, is set to become the standard model

1766 Irish novelist Oliver Goldsmith publishes The Vicar of Wakefield, with a hero who has much to complain about but keeps calm

1766 English chemist Henry Cavendish isolates hydrogen but believes that it is phlogiston

1766 Britain repeals the Stamp Act, in a major reversal of policy achieved by resistance in the American colonies

1765 American campaigners against the Stamp Act organize themselves as the Sons of Liberty in Massachusetts and New York

1765 The first mention of brewing in Mortlake describes two small adjacent breweries, in separate ownership, occupying between them about two acres

1765 Britain passes the Stamp Act, taxing legal documents and newspapers in the American colonies

1764 English author Horace Walpole provides an early taste of Gothic thrills in his novel Castle of Otranto

1764 English historian Edward Gibbon, sitting among ruins in Rome, conceives the idea of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

1764 Lancashire spinner James Hargreaves conceives the idea of the spinning jenny, with multiple spindles worked from a single wheel

1764 Joseph Haydn's first published work is six string quartets, a form which he subsequently makes very much his own

1764 Britain passes the Sugar Act, levying duty on sugar, wine and textiles imported into

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America

1764 Catherine the Great founds the Hermitage as a court museum attached to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg

1764 James Watt ponders on the inefficiency of contemporary steam engines and invents the condenser

1764 The Russian empress Catherine the Great secures the throne of Poland for one of her lovers, as Stanislaw II

1764 A French expedition from St Malo, founding a colony on East Falkland, name the islands Les Îsles Malouines

1763 American artist Benjamin West settles in London, where he becomes famous for his large-scale history scenes

1763 Some of Whitton Park's finest specimen trees and shrubs are transferred to the newly created botanical gardens at Kew.

1763 Elliot Bishop buys the 8-acre estate in the south east corner of Ham Common (the site of the future Cassel Hospital)

1763 7-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart begins a three-year concert tour of Europe

1763 Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, leads an uprising of the Indian tribes in an attempt to drive the British east of the Appalachians

1763 James Boswell meets Samuel Johnson for the first time, in the London bookshop of Thomas Davies

1763 English journalist John Wilkes is arrested for publishing seditious libel in issue no 45 of his weekly magazine The North Briton

1763 The Treaty of Hubertusburg, between Prussia and Austria, increases the power of Prussia among the many separate states of Germany

1763 In the treaty of Paris, Spain cedes Florida to Britain, completing British possession of the entire east coast of north America

1763 In the treaty of Paris France cedes to Britain all its territory north of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi river, except the district of New Orleans

1763 A treaty signed in Paris ends the Seven Years' War between Britain, France and Spain

1763 The capital of the Portuguese colony of Brazil is moved from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro

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1762 The Pagoda, designed by Sir William Chambers, is completed in Kew Gardens. The roofs are covered with varnished iron plates and there are 80 carved golden dragons on the corners of the roofs

1762 6-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart plays for the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa

1762 Fingal, supposedly by the medieval poet Ossian, is a forgery in the spirit of the times by James MacPherson

1762 The intensely dramatic music of Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice introduces a much needed reform in the conventions of opera

1762 Two books in this year, Émile and Du Contrat Social, prompt orders for the arrest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1762 Johann Sebastian Bach's youngest son, Johann Christian, moves to London and becomes known as the English Bach

1761 George Washington, the future president, inherits Mount Vernon from his half- brother Lawrence

1761 Italian anatomist Giovanni Battista Morgagni publishes De Sedibus, the work that introduces scientific pathology

1761 Designed by Sir William Chambers, the Orangery in Kew Gardens is completed. It bears the arms of Princess Augusta, for whom it was built, and her husband Prince Frederick.

1761 John Harrison's fourth chronometer is only five seconds out at the end of a test journey from England to Jamaica

1761 Austrian physician Joseph Leopold Auenbrugger describes his new diagnostic technique – percussion, or listening to a patient's chest and tapping

1761 Scottish chemist and physicist Joseph Black observes the latent heat in melting ice

1761 Joseph Haydn enters the service of the Esterházy family, and stays with them for twenty-nine years

1760 On the death of his grandfather, George II, George III becomes king of Great Britain

1760 A new theatre opens in Richmond, with a prologue written for the occasion by David Garrick

1760 Hampton Court is effectively abandoned by George III as a Royal dwelling and gradually becomes occupied by "Grace and Favour" residents

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1760 Asgill House, designed by Robert Taylor, is completed for Sir Charles Asgill, recently the Lord Mayor of London (17578)

1760-61 Walpole adds the Gallery, round tower, great cloister and cabinet to Strawberry Hill.

1760 Cricket is played on Broadhalfpenny Down in Hampshire

1760 German painter Johann Zoffany moves to England to find work as a painter of conversation pieces and portraits

1759 A succession of victories cause 1759 to be known in Britain as annus mirabilis, the wonderful year

1759 A British defeat of the French in Quiberon Bay prompts David Garrick to write Heart of Oak

1759 Wolfe defeats Montcalm and captures Quebec, but both commanders die in the engagement

1759 Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception

1759 The first (wooden) toll bridge at Kew, built by Robert Tunstall, is inaugurated by the Prince of Wales (later George III).. At this time it is the only bridge between Fulham and Kingston

1759 Frederick the Great suffers his first major defeat, by a Russian and Austrian army at Kunersdorf

1759 Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood sets up a factory of his own in his home town of Burslem

1759 The Portuguese expel the Jesuits from Brazil, beginning a widespread reaction against the order in Catholic Europe

1759 British general James Wolfe sails up the St Lawrence river with 15,000 men to besiege Quebec

1759 Voltaire publishes Candide, a satire on optimism prompted by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755

1759 Portrait-painter Thomas Gainsborough moves from Suffolk to set up a studio in fashionable Bath

1758 Liverpool-born artist George Stubbs sets up in London as a painter, above all, of people and horses

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1758 James Woodforde, an English country parson with a love of food and wine, begins a detailed diary of everyday life

1758 Stanhope remodels and extends Pope's Villa.

1758 A comet returns exactly at the time predicted by English astronomer Edmond Halley, and is subsequently known by his name

1758 Garrick commissions from Roubiliac a statue of Shakespeare for a large niche in the Temple at Hampton. The original is now in the British Museum and an exact is replica in Garrick's Temple

1758 Joshua Reynolds, by now the most fashionable portrait painter in London, copes with as many as 150 sitters in a year

1757 English painter Joseph Wright sets up a studio in his home town, Derby

1757 John Robartes dies and Radnor House passes through various ownerships.

1757 After the death of Prince Frederick in 1751, his widow Princess Augusta establishes the botanical gardens at Kew.

1757 William Pitt the Elder becomes secretary of state and transforms the British war effort against France in America

1757 Robert Adam returns to Britain after two years in Rome with a repertoire of classical themes which he mingles to form a new British neoclassicism

1757 Robert Clive defeats the nawab of Bengal at the battle of Plassey, and places his own man on the throne

1757 Admiral John Byng is shot on the deck of a ship in Portsmouth harbour for 'neglect of duty' in failing to relieve Minorca

1757 Walpole founds a printing press, the Strawberry Hill Press.

1756 Frederick the Great again precipitates a European conflict, marching without warning into Saxony and launching the Seven Years' War

1756 In what becomes known as the Diplomatic Revolution, two of Europe's long- standing rivals - France and Austria - sign a treaty of alliance

1756 The French in America, under the marquis of Montcalm, begin two highly successful years of campaigning against the British

1756 122 people die after being locked overnight in a small room in Calcutta, in an incident that becomes known as the Black Hole of Calcutta

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1755-1756 Garrick's Temple, designer unknown but possibly modelled on Lord Burlington's temple at Chiswick House, is built by David Garrick to entertain friends and house his Shakespeare mementos

1755 The army led by Edward Braddock and George Washington is ambushed at Fort Duquesne and Braddock is killed

1755 Johann Joachim Winckelmann publishes a book on Greek painting and sculpture which introduces a new strand of neoclassicism

1755 The first Conestoga wagons are acquired by George Washington for an expedition through the Alleghenies

1755 Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language

1755 A British force under Edward Braddock lands in America to provide support against the French in the Ohio valley

1754 Francesco Guardi, previously a painter of figures, begins to specialize in view of Venice, his native city

1754 The British colonies negotiate with the Iroquois at the Albany Congress, in the face of the French threat in the Ohio valley

1754 Benjamin Franklin proposes to the Albany Congress that the colonies should unite to form a colonial government

1754 George Washington kills ten French troops at Fort Duquesne, in the first violent clash of the French and Indian war

1754 Scottish chemist Joseph Black identifies the existence of a gas, carbon dioxide, which he calls 'fixed air'

1754 Quaker minister John Woolman publishes the first part of Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, an essay denouncing slavery

1754 Benjamin Franklin's chopped-up snake, urging union of the colonies with the caption 'Join or Die', is the first American political cartoon

1754 Richard Hoare moves into Barn Elms, beginning a long period of close involvement of the famous banking family in the affairs of Barnes

1754 David Garrick, famous Shakespearian actor, leases and then buys what was known as Hampton House, now Garrick's Villa, as a country retreat and place to entertain friends

1754 In Freedom of Will American evangelist Jonathan Edwards makes an

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uncompromising defence of orthodox against liberal Calvinism

1753 The first, highly decorative, Hampton Court Bridge with seven steep sided arches opens and replaces the ferry and the ford used in the drier season

1753 Walpole adds the library and refectory or great parlour to Strawberry Hill.

1753 George Washington undertakes a difficult and ineffectual journey to persuade the French to withdraw from the Ohio valley

1752 French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard wins the cherished Prix de Rome at the age of 20

1752 Benjamin Franklin flies a kite into a thunder cloud to demonstrate the nature of electricity

1752 The French seize or evict every English-speaking trader in the region of the upper Ohio

1752 English obstetrician William Smellie introduces scientific midwifery as a result of his researches into childbirth

1752 Britain is one of the last nations to adjust to the more accurate Gregorian calendar, causing a suspicious public to fear they have been robbed of eleven days

1751 English gardener Lancelot Brown sets up in business as a freelance 'improver of grounds', and soon acquires the nickname Capablity Brown

1751 French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin returns to the subject matter that first took his interest, still life

1751 Richard Owen Cambridge, after whom the house is named, buys Cambridge Park.

1751 English poet Thomas Gray publishes his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard

1751 By the time of his death the prolific output of Domenico Scarlatti includes 555 sonatas, all but a few for his own instrument, the harpsichord

1751 The Swedish chemist Alex Cronstedt identifies an impurity in copper ore as a separate metallic element, which he names nickel

1751 A great French undertaking by Denis Diderot, his 28-volume Encyclopédie, begins publication

1751 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo begins a series of frescoes to decorate the prince bishop's residence in Würzburg

1751 Robert Clive prevails over the French after holding out during the seven-week siege

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of Arcot in southern India

1750 A bridge is opened at Westminster

1750-97 Horace Walpole forms a 'Committee of Taste' with friends John Chute and Richard Bentley, and creates his 'little Gothic castle' over the next 50 years, giving rise to the style 'Strawberry Hill Gothic'.

1750 Horace Walpole begins to create his own Strawberry Hill, a neo-Gothic fantasy, on the banks of the Thames west of London

1750 Naval engagements are now fought in lines of battle, with only the most heavily armed vessels rated as 'ships of the line'

1749 Shortly before his death (in 1750) J.S. Bach completes his Mass in B Minor, worked on over many years

1749 Henry Fielding introduces a character of lasting appeal in the lusty but good-hearted Tom Jones

1749 A French official travels down the Ohio valley, placing markers to claim it for France

1749 Walpole buys the house and grounds which the deeds call Strawberry Hill.

1748 The peace treaty returns all captured territories to their owners – with the exception of Silesia, which becomes part of Prussia

1748 The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ends the War of the Austrian Succession, but only postpones the continuation of hostilities (in the Seven Years' War)

1748 Systematic digging begins near Vesuvius, in an area where ancient fragments are often unearthed

1747 Cambridge Park is enlarged by Martha Ashe the property having been in the Ashe family since 1657.

1747 Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence which grows into the longest novel in the English language

1747 Horace Walpole rents a small house, known locally as Chopp'd Straw Hall, with 5 acres of land.

1747 A tribal leader, Ahmad Shah Abdali, is elected king of the Afghans in an event seen as the foundation of the Aghan nation

1746 The French commander Maurice de Saxe succeeds in occupying the entire Austrian Netherlands

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1746 French forces capture the British East India Company's fort of Madras

1746 Monsieur Passemont constructs in Paris a millennium clock which can record the date in any year up to AD 9999

1746 An earthquake destroys much of Lima, and an ensuing tidal wave engulfs its port at Callao

1746 Tartan and Highland dress are banned by the British government, in a prohibition not lifted until 1782

1746 Charles Edward Stuart and his 5000 Scots are routed at Culloden, bringing the Forty-Five Rebellion to an abrupt end

1746 Frederick the Great begins to build the summer palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam

1745 Frederick II's three victories in 1745 cause him to be known by his contemporaries as Frederick the Great

1745 Frederick the Great's Prussian soldiers, advancing in shallow disciplined formation, outclass other armies of the time

1745 Charles Edward Stuart marches as far south as Derby, but then turns back

1745 Charles Edward Stuart gathers support for the Forty-Five Rebellion on his way south from the Hebrides and reaches Edinburgh

1745 Charles Edward Stuart lands at in the Hebrides, launching the Forty-Five Rebellion

1745 The principle of the Leyden jar is discovered by an amateur German physicist, Ewald Georg von Kleist, dean of the cathedral in Kamin

1745 Maurice de Saxe, with a French army including an Irish brigade, defeats British, Austrian and Dutch forces at Fontenoy

1745 New England militiamen achieve an unexpected success in capturing the fortress of Louisbourg from the French

1744 Alexander Pope dies and Pope's Villa and grounds are bought by Sir William Stanhope.

1744 Bad weather causes the French to abandon a plan to invade Britain with the Scottish pretender Charles Edward Stuart

1744 Franklin publishes his design for an improved stove in Account of the New Invented Pennsylvania Fire Place

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1744 J.S. Bach publishes another set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, as an addition to his previous Well-Tempered Clavier

1744 The Muslim reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab makes an alliance with Muhammad ibn Saud, of significance to the later Saudi dynasty

1744 France formally declares war on Britain half way through the War of the Austrian Succession

1744 Alexander Pope is buried in St Mary's Church.

1744 Churchwardens of St Mary's, Sir Godfrey Kneller and Thomas Vernon, raise funds and the church is rebuilt in red brick to a design of John James.

1744 Muhammad ibn Saud begins the expansion of power that will lead eventually to the establishment of Saudi Arabia

1744 Edward Filmer attends a cricket match in Kent

1743 Benjamin Franklin drafts in Philadelphia the founding document for the American Philosophical Society

1743 George II leads a British army to victory over the French at Dettingen

1742 Grove House is built in Ham Street, Ham

1742 Charity schools, one for boys and one for girls, are opened briefly on Kew Green, supported by local subscribers led by Prince Frederick

1742 Edmond Hoyle publishes the definitive rules of whist

1742 Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius proposes 100 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water

1742 An Austrian army captures the Bavarian capital city, Munich

1741 John Robartes extends and remodels Radnor House in the gothic style.

1741 French and Bavarian forces enter Prague, one of the most important cities in the Austrian empire

1741 Britain, already fighting Spain (in the War of Jenkin's Ear), is drawn into the wider conflict as an ally of Austria

1741 Spain, now an ally of France, joins in the war against Austria

1741 French and Bavarian armies join the war against Austria, marching through upper Austria into Bohemia

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1741 Venice's new theatre, the Teatro Novissimo, has machinery which can change the scenes in the blink of an eye

1741 American revivalism is inflamed by Jonathan Edwards' vivid sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

1741 Frederick's Prussian army defeats the Austrians at Mollwitz, securing his hold on most of Silesia

1741 J.S. Bach publishes his set of Goldberg Variations, supposedly written for performance by the young harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg

1741 The American Magazine and the General Magazine both begin a short-lived existence

1740 Frederick II, the king of Prussia, invades the neighbouring Habsburg province of Silesia, launching the War of the Austrian Succession

1740 The Habsburg emperor Charles VI dies and is succeeded by his elder daughter, the 23-year-old Maria Theresa

1740 Jack Broughton, champion of England, opens an academy to teach 'the mystery of boxing, that wholly British art'

1740 Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni makes a success of plays in the ancient commedia dell'arte tradition

1740 A charismatic leader, Baal Shem Tov, develops Hasidism in Poland as an influential revivalist movement within Judaism

1740 Frederick II, inheriting the throne in Prussia, establishes a cultured and musical court

1740 Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador become the Spanish viceroyalty of New Granada, with Bogota as the capital

1739 English highwayman Dick Turpin is convicted of stealing two horses, in Yorkshire, and is hanged

1739 David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science

1739 The Persian ruler Nadir Shah enters Delhi and removes much of the accumulated treasure of the Mughal empire

1739 Britain declares war on Spain, partly in a mood of indignation over Captain Jenkins' ear

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1738 In the Treaty of Vienna, France accepts the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VI – the last of the European powers to do so

1738 John Christopher builds the ‘Star and Garter’ tavern at the top of Petersham Common

1737 Prince Frederick marries Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and together they develop an increasing interest in botany and their gardens in Kew

1737 Florence loses her independence when the last Medici duke of Tuscany dies

1736 The leader of a gang of tribal brigands seizes the Persian throne and takes the name Nadir Shah

1735 A Palladian villa designed by Roger Morris is built in the eastern quarter of Whitton Park, and this new house becomes known as Whitton Place.

1735 Swedish chemist Georg Brandt discovers a new metallic element, which he names cobalt

1735 John Peter Zenger, editor of the Weekly Journal, is acquitted of libelling the governor of New York on the grounds that what he published was true

1735 Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus publishes a 'system of nature', capable of classifying all living things

1735-38 The Asam brothers build at their own expense the tiny and brilliant baroque church of St John Nepomuk, attached to their own house in Munich

1735 A revivalist movement in America, led by Jonathan Edwards, becomes known as the Great Awakening

1734-1735 Prince Frederick spends nearly £1000 on trees and shrubs, acquired from the local nurseryman Richard Butt for his estate in Kew

1733 Pope adds a portico to Pope's Villa to the design of William Kent.

1733 Benjamin Franklin establishes the most successful of America's almanacs, publishing it annually until 1758

1733 John Kay, working in the Lancashire woollen industry, patents the flying shuttle to speed up weaving

1733 Voltaire publishes a series of Philosophical Letters comparing the French unfavourably with England

1733 An alliance between the French and Spanish Bourbons is the first of what become

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known as the Family Compacts

1732 Frederick Prince of Wales takes a lease of a house at the west end of Kew Green opposite Kew Palace and instructs William Kent to remodel it. It becomes known as the White House.

1732 With the performance of Esther Handel taps a rich new vein, the English oratorio

1732 Georgia is granted to a group of British philanthropists, to give a new start in life to debtors

1731 Benjamin Franklin sets up a subscription library, the Library Company of Philadelphia

1731 English maker of telescopes John Hadley designs the instrument which evolves into the standard sextant used at sea

1731 Frederick, Prince of Wales, buys Kew Park, which with 19 acres is the only large estate in Kew not yet bought or leased by his parents.

1731 The Flemish-born sculptor Michael Rysbrack creates a momument to Newton in Westminster Abbey

1730 John and Charles Wesley form a Holy Club at Oxford which becomes the cradle of Methodism

1730 The Italian poet Metastasio produces, in Vienna, opera libretti which are used by almost every composer of the day

1729 Lady Kneller dies and Kneller Hall passes to Sir Godfrey Kneller's grandson.

1729 Benjamin Franklin prints, publishes and largely writes the weekly Pennsylvania Gazette

1729 The building of Marble Hill House is completed. The house is designed in the Palladian style and built under the supervision of Roger Morris. The grounds are laid out by Charles Bridgeman.

1728 Queen Caroline leases 'the Dutch House' while her husband, George II, is extending Richmond Gardens.

1728 The Danish explorer Vitus Bering sails into Arctic seas through the strait between Asia and America known now by his name

1727 Handel composes Zadok the Priest for the crowning of George II, and it has been sung at every subsequent British coronation

1727 On the death of his father, George I, George II becomes king of Great Britain

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1727 J.S. Bach conducts the first performance of his St Matthew Passion in the St Thomas's church in Leipzig

1726 Jonathan Swift launches his hero on a series of bitterly satirical adventures in Gulliver's Travels

1726 The original vertical sundial is affixed to the centre of the front of Dial House.

1726 North aisle of St Mary's Church is built, with vaults beneath, and school room (earlier building for Hampton School) and vestry room attached

1725 Pope constructs a tunnel under the road, Cross Deep, connecting riverside Pope's Villa with 5 acres of land, and he decorates the cellars of his villa and the tunnel to create a grotto.

1725 An aviary and a 'Green House' designed by James Gibbs are built in Whitton Park.

1725 Vivaldi publishes the set of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons

1725 The Russian tsar Peter the Great dies and is succeeded by his wife as the empress Catherine I

1724 Work starts on Maids of Honour Row, four magnificent houses commissioned as lodgings for the ladies-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales

1724 Whitton Park is extended to 26 acres and planted with exotic trees and shrubs.

1724 The building of Marble Hill House begins on land acquired for Henrietta Howard (1688-1767) by Archibald Campbell, Earl of Ilay (later third Duke of Argyll)

1724 General Wade, commander-in-chief of North Britain, begins an impressive programme of road construction in the Scottish Highlands

1723 Sir Godfrey Kneller dies and leaves Kneller Hall to his widow Susannah.

1723 The Austrian emperor, Charles VI, agrees that Hungary shall be ruled as a separate kingdom within his empire

1722 Thomas Twining 1 buys a property next to St Mary's Church and redevelops the building which becomes known as Dial House

1722 John Robartes, later fourth Earl of Radnor, leases Radnor House.

1722 Whitton Park is bought by Archibald Campbell, Lord Ilay, later third Duke of Argyll.

1722 16-year-old Benjamin Franklin contributes the 'Dogood Papers', essays on moral topics, to a Boston journal, The New England Courant

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1722 J.S. Bach publishes The Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of 24 Preludes and Fugues

1722 Easter Island is reached by the Dutch, beginning a spate of European discovery in the islands of the Pacific

1722 The Iroquois League becomes known as the Six Nations, after the Tuscarora join the group

1721 Johann Sebastian Bach writes the six Brandenburg Concertos for his employer at the court of Köthen

1721 Jean-Antoine Watteau paints the most splendid shop sign in history, for his friend Gersaint

1721 In a ceremony in St Petersburg's cathedral Peter the Great has himself proclaimed 'emperor of all Russia'

1721 With the transfer of Swedish territory on the Baltic coast, Russia becomes the dominant power in the region

1721 becomes Britain's chief minister and holds the post for an unrivalled span of twenty-one years

1721 In the treaty of Nystad Sweden cedes Estonia to Russia together with most of Latvia (the rest of which soon follows)

1720 Canaletto begins to specialize in views of the Venetian canals, finding his main customers among the British

1720 Young noblemen, particularly from Britain, visit Italy on the Grand Tour

1720 Pope builds a villa, in the Palladian style.

1720 The Dalai Lama in Lhasa accepts Chinese imperial protection, which lasts until 1911

1720s In the Duke of Argyll's Petersham estate James Gibbs builds the Palladian villa of Sudbrook Park, with a famous cube room

1720 Shares in John Law's Louisiana Company rise spectacularly and then collapse, in what becomes known as the Mississippi Bubble

1720 The Limes is built, at 123 Mortlake High Street

1720 Two political parties emerge in Sweden's parliament and become known as the Hats and the Caps

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1720 Shares in the South Sea Company rise rapidly and collapse within the year, in the so-called South Sea Bubble

1720 Johann Sebastian Bach compiles the Little Keyboard Book a set of pieces to teach his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

1720 Like the symphony, the string quartet develops during the eighteenth century, moving from simple beginnings to great complexity

1720 The postchaise, introduced in France, provides the first chance of reasonably comfortable travel by land

1720 The symphony begins to develop as a musical form, deriving from the overtures of operas

1720 The lighter rococo style, beginning in France, becomes an extension of the baroque

1719 Alexander Pope comes to live in Twickenham and leases some riverside land with several small cottages.

1719 Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel

1718 The Octagon, a garden pavilion designed by James Gibbs, is added to Orleans House.

1718 The tsarevitch Alexis, heir to Peter the Great, dies from violence inflicted on him in prison

1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, observing the Turkish practice of inoculation against smallpox, submits her infant son to the treatment

1717 The earl of Burlington employs Colen Campbell to remodel his house in the Palladian style

1717 Scottish entrepreneur John Law establishes the Louisiana Company to develop the Mississippi valley for France

1716 The Habsburg emperor Charles VI has a son, but the child dies within the year

1715 John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, defeats the Old Pretender’s troops at the battle of Sherrifmuir, for which he is rewarded with an estate in Petersham, carved out of Richmond Park

1715 Colen Campbell creates interest in the Palladian style in Britain with the publication of his Vitruvius Britannicus

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1715 A Jacobite uprising in Scotland on behalf of the Old Pretender ends in fiasco

1715 Louis XIV dies after seventy-two years on the throne

1714 In his Monadology Leibniz describes a universe consisting of forceful interactive parts that he calls 'monads'

1714 The first St Anne's church is built on Kew Green.

1714 The British government offers a massive £20,000 prize for a chronometer capable of keeping accurate time at sea

1714 On the death of Queen Anne, the Act of Settlement delivers the British crown to the elector of Hanover, as George I

1714 Fahrenheit perfects the mercury thermometer and decides on a 180-degree interval between the freezing and boiling points of water

1714 Cosmas Damian Asam begins work on a highly theatrical creation, the Benedictine Abbey of Weltenburg (1714-1735), joined by his younger brother Egid Quirin from 1721

1714 Strasbourg and Alsace are ceded to Louis XIV and become part of France

1714 In the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Spanish Netherlands are transferred to Austria

1713 The Diana or Arethusa Fountain, decorated with bronze sculptures by Hubert Le Sueur, is placed in the centre of the round pond in Bushy Park

1713 Edward Proger dies in Bushy House at the age of 96

1713 The treaties signed in Utrecht bring to an end the War of the Spanish Succession

1713 The emperor Charles VI issues a Pragmatic Sanction, declaring that the remaining Habsburg empire can be inherited through the female line

1713 April 9 Nave and chancel of St Mary's Church collapse leaving only the fifteenth- century tower, itself the survivor of an earlier building.

1712 The violinist Archangelo Corelli composes his Christmas Concerto, the best known of his influential group of twelve Concerti Grossi

1712 The tsar formally marries Catherine, his mistress for nearly ten years (though they may have married secretly five years earlier)

1712 Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock introduces a delicate vein of mock-heroic in English poetry

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1711 Handel's success in London with his opera Rinaldo prompts him to settle in Britain

1710 James Johnston, Secretary of State for Scotland, commissions John James to design his new house, to become known later as Orleans House.

1710 25-year-old George Berkeley attacks Locke in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

1710 The Byerley Turk, Darley Arabian and Godolphin Arabian, ancestors of all thoroughbred racehorses, are imported into England

1710 Machines are thrown out of the window of a Spitalfields factory, in an early protest against industrialization

1710 Christopher Wren's new domed St Paul's cathedral is completed in London

1710 Thomas Newcomen creates a piston steam engine, with the steam condensed in the cylinder by a jet of cold water

1709 Sir Godfrey Kneller buys and demolishes an earlier house and builds a new house, Whitton Hall, which is later known as Kneller Hall, on the site.

1709 In a friendly keyboard contest in Rome between Handel and Domenico Scarlatti, the result is a draw – Handel being the winner on the organ and Scarlatti on the harpsichord

1709 Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale discovers the use of coke in the smelting of pig iron

1709 Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, is discovered on a Pacific island where he has survived alone for nearly five years

1709 The Tatler launches a new style of journalism in Britain's coffee houses, followed two years later by the Spectator

1709 The Swedish king Charles XII suffers his first major defeat in a brilliant career, when he faces the Russians at Poltava

1708 The secret of true porcelain is at last discovered in the west, at Dresden, by Johann Friedrich Böttger

1707 The Act of Union merges England and Scotland as 'one kingdom by the name of Great Britain', a century after the union of the crowns

1707 The death of Aurangzeb introduces the long period of decline of the Mughal empire

1704 The duke of Marlborough wins a major victory over the French at Blenheim,

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capturing twenty-four battalions and four regiments

1704 The tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Rai, names as his successor the sacred book known as the Granth

1703 Work begins on a house for Richard Hill, brother of Queen Anne's confidante Mrs Masham, which is named for two stone trumpeters either side of the portico

1703 The Mortlake Tapestry workshops are closed

1703 Peter the Great founds the port and city of St Petersburg, giving Russia access to the Baltic

1703 Peter the Great falls for a Lithuanian serf, Catherine, who becomes his life-long companion

1702 German chemist Georg Stahl coins the name phlogiston for the substance believed to be released in the process of burning

1702 On the death of her brother-in-law, William III, Anne becomes queen of England and Scotland

1702 The Augustan Age begins in English literature, claiming comparison with the equivalent flowering under Augustus Caesar

1701 The War of the Spanish Succession breaks out between French and Austrian claimants to the Spanish throne

1701 The Act of Settlement declares that no Catholic may inherit the English crown

1700 The original medieval Milbourne House is largely rebuilt

1700 Boston merchant Samuel Sewall publishes The Selling of Joseph, a very early anti- slavery tract

1700 Peter the Great sets up numerous schools and commercial enterprises to enable Russia to compete in Europe

1700 Poland, Russia and Denmark attack Sweden, beginning the 21-year Northern War

1700 The Banqueting House at Hampton Court is built with carving by Grinling Gibbons and a painted interior which is the work, at least in part, of Antonio Verrio

1700 Charles II, the childless king of Spain. leaves all his territories to Philip of Anjou, a grandson of the French king, Louis XIV

1700 Holland and England are now producing the magnificent ocean-going merchant vessels known as East Indiamen

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1700 In the years after the battle of the Boyne, Catholic ownership of land in Ireland is reduced to just 14% of the total

1699 The Chestnut Avenue through Bushy Park is laid out for William III to a design by Sir Christopher Wren

1699 The tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Rai, commits his people to the five Ks, which become the outward signs of their group identity

1699 Grinling Gibbons begins work on carving decorative features and architectural mouldings in the King's Appartments at Hampton Court

1698 On the death of Elizabeth, Duchess of Lauderdale, Ham House is inherited by her Tollemache descendants who manage the estate for the next 250 years

1698 Peter the Great makes a symbolic gesture of reform in trimming his boyars' beards

1698 Scotland makes a disastrous attempt to establish a colony in Darien, on the isthmus of Panama

1698 A maker of harpsichords in Florence, Bartolomeo Cristofori, develops the piano ('soft') and forte ('loud') feature which leads to the piano

1698 Thomas Savery creates the first practical steam engine, designed to pump water out of mines

1698 A fleet from Oman evicts the Portuguese from Mombasa and Zanzibar

1697 In the Treaty of Rijswijk, Spain cedes the western half of Hispaniola to France, which names its new colony Saint-Domingue

1697 In his opera La Caduta de' Decemviri, Alessandro Scarlatti introduces a new form of prelude, later known as the Italian overture, which is an important stage in the development of the symphony

1697 The Russian tsar, Peter I, studies western European technology, working as a ship's carpenter in Dutch and English shipyards

1696 Fort St William is built by the East India Company in the Ganges delta, and subsequently develops into Calcutta

1696 Peter the Great makes an unexpected raid down the river Don and captures Azov from the Crimean Tatars

1695 The first teacher of the virtuoso harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti is his father, Alessandro

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1695 The new Privy Garden at Hampton Court is built (the Mount had previously been levelled) including a new elm bower and a new Great Parterre of complex design and an Orangery

1694 Barn Elms is demolished by Thomas Cartwright, who replaces it with a country house in a contemporary style

1694 The joint monarch of England, Mary II, dies - leaving her husband, William III, to reign alone

1694 Mary II dies of smallpox and building work at Hampton Court is suspended for 3 years due to William's grief and also for financial reasons due to the enormous expenditure

1694 The Bank of England is founded and soon becomes the central banker for England's many private banks

1693 Gold is found in Brazil, launching the first great American gold rush

1692 Twenty people convicted of witchcraft are hanged in Salem, and one is pressed to death

1692 The Massachusetts town of Salem is gripped by witch-hunting hysteria

1692 Government soldiers, mainly Campbells, massacre their MacDonald hosts in Glencoe

1690 John Locke publishes his Essay concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience

1690 John Strong, landing on some remote Atlantic islands, names them after Viscount Falkland, treasurer of the British navy

1690 The Church of Scotland finally wins recognition as an independent Presbyterian body

1690 The French scientist Denis Papin, while professor of mathematics at Marburg, develops the first steam engine to use a piston

1690 Chinoiserie becomes the new craze in Europe, after Jesuit reports of the Chinese civilization

1690 The armies of James II and William III confront each at the river Boyne, with victory going to William

1690 France by now has six fortified trading settlements around the coast of India, of which Pondicherry is the most important

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1689 Young gentlewomen in Chelsea give the first performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

1689 The Great Fountain Garden at Hampton Court, occupying the semi-circle of land between the East Front and the park, is designed with 13 fountains powered by the Longford River

1689 The 17-year-old Peter the Great becomes co-tsar of Russia with his half-brother Ivan V

1689 A Grand Alliance against France is formed by almost all the other powers in Europe

1689 The Great Fountain Garden at Hampton Court, occupying the semi-circle of land between the East Front and the park, is designed with 13 fountains powered by the Longford River

1689 James II, landing in Ireland, is acclaimed as king in Dublin by enthusiastic Irish Catholics

1689-1694 William III and Mary II embark on extensive work at Hampton Court including demolition of the old Royal lodgings and building of new South and East Fronts around a new quadrangle, the Fountain Court

1689 Parliament in Westminster makes the restrictive Bill of Rights the condition on which William III and Mary II are crowned

1688 William III of Orange lands with an army at Torbay and marches to London with almost no opposition from supporters of James II

1688 John Bunyan dies during a preaching visit to London, and is buried in the Nonconformist cemetery, Bunhill Fields

1688 English grandees invite William III of Orange and his wife Mary, daughter of James II, to claim the British throne

1688 Sébastien de Vauban's socket bayonet is introduced in the French army

1688 Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African slave trade

1688 A son (the future 'Old Pretender') is born to James II, giving Britain a Catholic heir to the throne

1687 The Hungarian diet grants the Habsburg dynasty in Austria a hereditary right to the crown of St Stephen

1687 Newton publishes Principia Mathematica, proving gravity to be a constant in all physical systems

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1686 English naturalist John Ray begins publication of his Historia Plantarum, classifying some 18,600 plants in 'mutual fertility' species

1685 400,000 Huguenots leave France after Louis XIV deprives them of their rights by revoking the Edict of Nantes

1685 Denis Papin, a French scientist working in England, demonstrates a pressure cooker fitted with a safety valve

1685 James II succeeds to the throne in Britain and immediately introduces pro-Catholic policies

1684 John Bunyan publishes the second part of The Pilgrim's Progress

1683 The Turks are driven from the walls of Vienna by the Polish king John Sobieski, in what proves a historic turning point

1683 The Qing emperor orders all Chinese men to shave their heads, leaving only a long pigtail

1683 Mennonites and other from Germany (later known as the Pennsylvania Dutch) begin to settle in Penn's liberal colony

1683 The emperor, Leopold I, and his court abandon Vienna on the approach of a Turkish army

1682 William Penn achieves peace for Pennsylvania by negotiating a treaty with the local Lenape (or Delaware) tribes

1682 William Penn approves the Great Law, allowing complete freedom of religious belief in Pennsylvania

1682 Robert de la Salle travels down the Mississippi to its mouth and claims the entire region for France, naming it Louisiana

1682 John Bunyan publishes The Holy War, an allegory of the devil laying siege to the human soul

1681 Charles II grants William Penn the charter for the region that becomes Pennsylvania, in settlement of a debt to Penn's father

1681 A professional ballet company in Paris introduces female dancers and the world's first prima ballerina, Mlle de Lafontaine

1681 The Canal du Midi is completed in France, including at one point a 160-metre tunnel through high ground

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1680 A private estate on the West Field corner of Hounslow Heath comprising 12 acres of land and a substantial house becomes known as Whitton Park.

1680 A comet intrigues Edmund Halley, who works out that it has been around before

1680 Ireland becomes the first European region in which the potato is an important food crop

1680 John Bunyan publishes The Life and Death of Mr Badman, an allegory of a misspent life that is akin to a novel

1680 The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico rise against the Spanish, killing 21 missionaries and some 400 colonists

1680 Louis XIV persecutes the Huguenots by means of dragonnades - the billetting of unruly dragoons in the homes of villagers

1680 Feudal labour laws demanding corvée (compulsory unpaid labour) are imposed by the Habsburgs on the Czech peasants of Bohemia

1680 The English clockmaker Thomas Tompion is the first to make successful use of the hairspring in pocket watches

1679 19-year-old Alessandro Scarlatti has a great success in Rome with Gli Equivoci nel Sembiante, the first of his 115 operas

1679 The tower of St Mary's Church is rebuilt in red brick, replacing one of flint and stone

1679 The rival political parties in Britain find abusive names for each other - Whigs and Tories

1678 Christiaan Huygens expounds the theory that light consists of a vibration forming a ripple of waves

1678 Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress, written during John Bunyan's two spells in Bedford Gaol, is published and is immediately popular

1678 The Popish Plot, an invented Jesuit conspiracy to kill Charles II, results in the execution of about thirty-five Roman Catholics

1677 Wren completes Monument to commemorate Fire

1677 Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, dealing with God, the mind and the emotions, is published shortly after his death

1677 With his powerful new microscope Leeuwenhoek observes spermatozoa in the semen of a dog

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1677 John Bunyan is imprisoned again, for about six months, in a new wave of persecution of Nonconformists

1676 Ole Roemer, a Danish astronomer working with Cassini in Paris, calculates the speed of light with an error of only 25%

1675 A sudden uprising by the Wampanoag Indians against the new England settlements begins the conflict known as King Philip's War

1675 The house of West Hall is built for let, probably by Thomas Juxon, lord of the manor, to be followed by the house of Brick Farm

1675 The double-hung sash window is introduced in England and soon spreads to Holland

1675 Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock, now develops the hairspring - of great future importance in watches

1675 Dutch traders purchase Kakiemon wares in Japan for import to the Netherlands

1674 Samuel Sewall begins a diary of daily life in Boston, Massachusetts, that will span a period of more than fifty years

1674 The Dutch scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek builds a microscope powerful enough for him to observe and describe the red corpuscles in blood

1673 The house, later known as Radnor House, is built, probably by John Hooker

1673 Parliament in England passes a Test Act excluding Catholics and Nonconformists from public office

1673 Sébastien de Vauban's new technique for conducting the siege of a town shows its effectiveness at Maastricht

1673 Molière falls fatally ill when acting in his own play Le Malade Imaginaire

1673 The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb begins building the great Badshahi Mosque in Lahore

1672 John Bunyan is released from Bedford Gaol as a result of the Declaration of Indulgence

1672 Isaac Newton's experiments with the prism demonstrate the link between wavelength and colour in light

1672 Charles II issues a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending the restrictions on Catholics and Nonconformists

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1672 Giovanni Domenico Cassini, working in the Paris royal observatory, calculates the distance from the earth to the sun and is only 7% out

1671 Elizabeth Tollemache, now a widow and owner of Ham House, marries the Earl (later Duke) of Lauderdale, member of the Cabal that ruled England under Charles II

1670 Members of the Sakaida Kakiemon family are producing exquisitely decorated porcelain ware in Japan

1670 The Dutch develop a new pattern of middle-class urban life and architecture, later copied in England

1669 Samuel Pepys ends his diary, after only writing it for nine years

1669 Robert de La Salle makes his first exploration of the Ohio valley, providing the basis for France's later claim to the area

1669 The duke of York, heir to the English and Scottish thrones, is secretly received into the Roman Catholic church

1668 The Bank of Sweden is founded, and survives today as the world's oldest bank

1668 Spain finally accepts the independence of the kingdom of Portugal, after nearly a century of Spanish rule

1668 England's East India Company is granted a lease on Bombay by Charles II, who has received it from his Portuguese bride

1668 The Jesuits establish a mission at Sault Sainte Marie which becomes the starting point for French exploration south of the Great Lakes

1667 In the treaty of Breda, England keeps New Amsterdam and New Netherland, and Holland keeps the English-held territory of Surinam

1667 Wood-carver Grinling Gibbons arrives from Holland to begin an immensely successful career in England

1667 Paradise Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10

1667 French dramatist Jean Racine's first great success, Andromaque, finds tragic drama in a quadrangle of love

1667 Bernini's great curving colonnade is completed, to form the piazza in front of St Peter's

1667 The first successful human blood transfusion is achieved in Paris by Jean Baptiste Denis, apparently saving the life of a 15-year-old boy

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1667 Michiel de Ruyter sails up the Thames to destroy much of the English fleet at its base in the Medway

1666 John Bunyan publishes his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, written in Bedford Gaol

1666 The Great Fire of London rages for four days, destroying 13,200 houses and 81 churches

1666 New Amsterdam is renamed New York by the recently established English regime

1665 Isaac Newton spends a creative period in Lincolnshire, at home in Woolsthorpe Manor, apples or no apples

1665 A new Danish constitution (the Kongeloven or King's Law) makes the monarchy hereditary and grants the king absolute power

1665 The Great Plague of London causes as many as 7000 deaths in a week and perhaps a total of 100,000 by the end of the year

1665 The Five Mile Act prevents Nonconformist ministers in England from coming closer than five miles to any town where they have ministered

1665 The first recorded attempt at blood transfusion, at the Royal Society in London, proves that the idea is feasible

1664 Peter Stuyvesant accepts the reality of the military situation and yields New Amsterdam to the British without a shot being fired

1664 The Conventicle Act restricts worship in England to Anglican churches if more than a few people are present

1664 Louis XIV commissions a well-established team of designers to provide him with a spectacular palace and garden at Versailles

1664 Colbert founds East India and West India companies to ensure a supply of raw materials for France's factories

1663 Bushy House is built by Edward Proger, in the royal enclosure now known as Bushy Park, by order of Charles II

1662 An academy of English scientists is given a royal charter by Charles II and becomes the Royal Society

1662 The Act of Uniformity demands that Anglican clergy accept all the Thirty-Nine Articles, costing many their livings

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1662 Jean-Baptiste Colbert buys the Gobelin family workshops in Paris and transforms them into a royal factory for Louis XIV

1662 British chemist Robert Boyle defines the inverse relationship between pressure and volume in any gas (subsequently known as Boyle's Law)

1662 The Long Water at Hampton Court (3800 ft long), supplied by the Longford River, is constructed flanked by avenues of Dutch limes aligned on the Queen's Drawing Room and a semi-circular canal at the East Front

1661 Louis XIV establishes a royal dancing academy and soon follows it with a music academy

1661 A banker in Sweden, Johan Palmstruch, issues Europe's first paper currency, on behalf of the Stockholm Banco

1661 The British establish Fort James on an island in the Gambia river

1661 Italian doctor Marcello Malpighi discovers the capillaries, thus completing the evidence for the circulation of the blood

1661 The Cavalier Parliament begins to pass a series of acts, known as the Clarendon Code, containing punitive measures against Presbyterians

1661 York House is bought by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor to Charles II.

1661 The body of Oliver Cromwell is hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn

1661 John Bunyan is convicted of unlicensed preaching and spends the next eleven years in Bedford Gaol

1660 John Bunyan is arrested for preaching without a licence

1660 The Act of Indemnity, pardoning all offences since 1637 except those of the regicides, is given the royal assent

1660 Sweden wins the province of Skåne from Denmark, thus acquiring an unbroken stretch of Baltic coastline from Göteborg to Riga

1660 Louis XIV grants New France the status of a royal province and greatly increases the flow of colonists to north America

1660 The berlin, developed in Berlin, becomes the most successful carriage of the seventeenth century

1660 Charles II lands at Dover and is given a warm welcome in London four days later

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1660 The new Convention Parliament in Westminster invites Charles II to return as king

1660 Monck persuades Charles II to sign, at Breda in Holland, a declaration of policies to heal the wounds of the Civil War

1660 Monck, reaching London, dissolves the Long Parliament and convenes a new one

1660 On the first day of the new year Samuel Pepys gets up late, eats the remains of the turkey and begins his diary

1660 General George Monck marches south from Scotland to London, to intervene in England's unresolved political crisis

1659 John Bunyan marries his second wife, Elizabeth

1659 The ineffective Richard Cromwell goes into voluntary retirement, an event linked to the strong possibility of a military coup

1658 The Dutch expel the Portuguese from the last of their trading posts in Sri Lanka

1658 Prince Rupert of the Rhine pioneers mezzotint, the first half-tone technique in printing

1658 Cromwell dies after naming his son Richard to succeed him in the office of Lord Protector

1658 Parliamentary reprisals against the rebellious Irish result in two thirds of Ireland's land being owned by the English or the Scots

1658 Samuel Pepys has a two-ounce stone cut from his bladder, in an operation carried out at home in the presence of his family

1658 For the final years of his life the emperor Shah Jahan is held a prisoner, by his son Aurangzeb, in Agra's Red Fort

1657 John Bunyan becomes an itinerant preacher, supporting himself by mending pots and pans

1657 Andrew Marvell works as assistant Latin secretary to Milton in Cromwell's department for foreign affairs

1657 The Dutch in South Africa purchase slaves to do domestic and agricultural work

1656 John Bunyan's first wife dies, leaving him with four young children

1656 John Bunyan engages in a fierce war of pamphlets with the Quakers, with whose doctrines he profoundly disagrees

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1656 Velazquez, in , paints himself painting the king and queen of Spain

1656 Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens constructs the first pendulum clock, on Christmas Day in the Hague

1656 After a six-month siege, the Dutch capture Colombo from the Portuguese in Sri Lanka

1656 Pitcarne dies in 1640 and York House is eventually sold by his family to the Earl of Manchester.

1656 Jews return to England after Cromwell repeals the law of 1290 forbidding their residence in the country

1655 Christiaan Huygens, using a home-made telescope, describes accurately the rings of Saturn and discovers the planet's largest moon, Titan

1655 The British, settling in Jamaica, soon turn the island into the major slave market of the West Indies

1655 George Fox begins preaching in England, in a movement which develops into the Society of Friends - or Quakers

1655 Diego Velazquez paints his only surviving female nude, The Toilet of Venus (known as the Rokeby Venus)

1655 The painter Pieter de Hooch is a friendly guide through the welcoming spaces of the seventeenth-century Dutch courtyard and home

1654 Otto von Guericke uses sixteen horses to demonstrate in Regensburg the power of a vacuum

1654 Queen Christina, a secret convert to Catholicism, abdicates in Sweden and travels to Rome

1653 Devoted fisherman Izaak Walton publishes the classic work on the subject, The Compleat Angler

1653 John Bunyan joins a Nonconformist church in Bedford and becomes one of their preachers

1653 The English admiral Robert Blake introduces a system of signalling at sea by means of flags

1653 Jan Vermeer marries and begins a quiet career as a painter and art dealer in his home town of Delft

1653 Cromwell is appointed Lord Protector of the Commonwealth for life, under

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legislation entitled the Instrument of Government

1653 The 14-year-old Louis XIV dances in a court ballet as Apollo, wearing a glorious sun costume, and finds that he likes the role

1653 Cromwell uses troops to turn the members out of the House of Commons and locks the door behind them

1652 Turenne defeats Condé in a battle in the Paris suburbs, hastening the decline of the Fronde

1652 The first coffee house opens In London and Londoners soon find such places useful to meet in and do business

1652 A clash at sea between English and Dutch fleets begins the first of three Anglo- Dutch wars

1652 Jan van Riebeeck establishes a Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope

1652 Scotland and England are merged under English parliamentary rule, in a forced union which lasts eight years

1652 Nikon becomes patriarch of all Russia and introduces reforms which cause the Old Believers to form a breakaway sect

1651 Charles II is defeated by Cromwell at Worcester and escapes in disguise to France

1651 Parliament in England passes the first of several Navigation Acts designed to reserve international trade for English ships

1651 Charles II returns to Scotland and is crowned king of Scots in the traditional manner at Scone

1650 Richmond Palace is sold, probably as several lots, and within a year the stones and bricks are being carted off by builders for use elsewhere

1650 The poems of Massachusetts author Anne Bradstreet are published in London under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America

1650 The Dalai Lama declares that his teacher is also an incarnation of a future Buddha, and that he is to be known as Panchen

1650 A German burgomaster, Otto von Guericke, devises an air pump capable of creating a vacuum

1650 To protect their market, the Dutch destroy all clove trees in the Moluccas except on two islands, Amboina and Ternate

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1650 James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, calculates that creation began on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC

1650 Japan's popular theatre, kabuki, develops as a form of café entertainment

1650 Hindu princes and brahmin priests withdraw from Java to Bali, turning the island into the last outpost of Hinduism in southeast Asia

1650 Descartes catches a fatal chill, returning home in midwinter from pre-dawn instruction of Queen Christina of Sweden

1650 The pleasure districts of Edo and Kyoto provide the delights of ukiyo-e, the 'floating world'

1649 John Bunyan marries a woman whose only possessions inspire him - they are two religious books inherited from her father

1649 Ham House is inherited by William Murray’s daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Sir Lyonel (later Earl) Tollemache

1649 After the execution of Charles I, Parliament sets about selling the royal estates to raise funds

1649 Cromwell captures the royalist stronghold of Drogheda and massacres some 2800 people

1649 The Russian empire, expanding eastwards through Siberia, reaches the Pacific coast

1649 John Milton becomes Latin secretary in Cromwell's council of state

1649 Rembrandt creates an etching so desirable that it becomes known as the Hundred Guilder Print

1649 Parliament chooses Oliver Cromwell to chair the new English Commonwealth's council of state

1649 Parliament in London abolishes the monarchy in England, as 'unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous'

1649 Charles II, in the Hague, inherits the English and Scottish thrones of his executed father, Charles I

1649 Charles I is beheaded on a scaffold erected in the street in London's Whitehall

1649 After a trial lasting a week in Westminster Hall, Charles I is convicted of treason for fighting a war against parliament

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1649 Charles I, brought to trial before 135 commissioners in Westminster Hall, refuses to recognise the court's validity

1649 Cromwell persuades the House of Commons, purged now of all opposition, that it is treason for a king to wage war against parliament

1648 Colonel Thomas Pride denies entrance to the House of Commons to about 140 opponents of Cromwell's policies

1648 Spain recognizes the independence of the United Provinces of the Netherlands

1648 Parliamentary forces defeat the Scottish invaders and suppress other new outbreaks of royalist support

1648 The Peace of Westphalia finally brings to an end the Thirty Years' War

1648 The Dutch chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont suggests that there are insubstantial substances other than air, and coins a name for them - gases

1648 A rebellion of nobles against Mazarin, the principal minister of the young Louis XIV, becomes known as the Fronde

1648 Iroquois raids drive the Huron west to the Great Lakes

1648 A Cossack rebellion leads to the eventual transfer of their territory from Poland to Russia

1648 Scottish Covenanters invade England in support of the English king, Charles I, in his struggle against parliament

1647 Charles I comes to a secret arrangement with a group of Covenanters in Scotland, winning their support

1647 Charles I is held at his palace of Hampton Court, as a prisoner of Cromwell and parliament

1647 Peter Stuyvesant begins a 17-year spell as director-general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland in North America

1647 The Scottish army holding Charles I makes peace with parliament, and hands the king to parliamentary commissioners

1647 The Swiss cantons agree on joint action to defend their external borders, in the pact known as the Defensionale of Wyl

1646 Charles I puts himself in the hands of a Scottish army, opposed at the time to the English parliament

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1646 A young Hindu prince, Shivaji, captures Bijapur in a campaign against Muslim rulers that will result in his establishing a Maratha empire

1646 With the help of his more robust brother-in-law, Blaise Pascal provides physical proof that atmospheric pressure varies with altitude

1646 With a parliamentary army surrounding royalist Oxford, Charles I escapes in disguise and heads north

1646 The aged Powhatan leader Opechancanough is captured by the English and executed, ending the last significant Indian threat to Virginia

1645 The royalist forces, again under the command of Rupert of the Rhine, suffer another major defeat at Naseby

1645 The Dutch artist Aelbert Cuyp paints landscapes that glow with the warmth of gentle sunlight

1645 Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell form England's first professional army, calling it the New Model Army

1644 In the first decisive battle of the English Civil War the king's nephew, Rupert of the Rhine, is heavily defeated at Marston Moor

1644 In his Principles of Philosophy Descartes gives priority to reason, summed up in his famous phrase cogito ergo sum

1644 The last Ming emperor hangs himself, and China acquires a new and final dynasty - the Qing

1644 The Powhatan leader Opechancanough launches another surprise attack on the Virgiinia settlements, killing about 500 colonists

1644 The British East India Company completes the construction of Fort St George in Madras

1643 The Prince de Condé and the Vicomte de Turenne emerge as brilliant generals in France's wars

1643 Evangelista Torricelli, observing variations in a column of mercury, discovers the principle of the barometer

1643 Abel Tasman reaches yet more islands previously unknown to Europeans – Tonga and Fiji

1643 Mazarin becomes principal minister in France, selected by the queen regent on the death of Louis XIII

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1643 Louis XIV inherits the throne of France at the age of four

1642 The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman attempts to land in Golden Bay, New Zealand, resulting in a clash with the Maoris

1642 Charles I withdraws to Oxford, where he establishes his court for the rest of the war

1642 Charles I marches to within a few miles of Westminster (to Turnham Green), but withdraws without engaging the enemy

1642 Charles I leads his army into action at Edgehill - the first, but inconclusive, battle in the English Civil War

1642 Charles I, at Nottingham, raises the royal standard - signalling that he considers himself at war

1642 Parliament sends Charles I a list of political demands, the Nineteen Propositions, which it would be impossible for him to accept

1642 Abel Tasman makes landfall in the Macquarie Harbour area in the island now known after him, Tasmania

1642 The Briare canal, joining the Seine to the Loire, has a staircase of six consecutive locks

1642 The Mongols depose the ruling dynasty of Tibet and offer the country to the Dalai Lama, to be ruled by him with Mongol military support

1642 Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, travels to Holland, taking with her the English crown jewels

1642 Charles I leaves London and heads for the north of England, where his support is the strongest

1642 Charles I comes in person to the House of Commons, but fails in his attempt to arrest the Five Members whom he accuses of treason

1641 Parliament presents Charles I with the Grand Remonstrance, a long list of grievances against his conduct of the realm

1641 The Dutch expel the Portuguese from their trading posts in Malacca

1641 The profusion of paintings on sale in Holland astonishes an English visitor, John Evelyn

1641 Under pressure from parliament, Charles I signs the death warrant of his most powerful supporter, the earl of Strafford

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1641 Roundhead is now in use as a term of abuse for supporters of parliament

1641 Cavalier is now in use as a term of abuse for supporters of the royal cause

1640 The new parliament immediately impeaches Charles I's two closest advisers, the earl of Strafford and archbishop William Laud

1640 Charles I's financial crisis causes him to summon another parliament to Westminster (the Long Parliament, not dissolved until 1660)

1640 The first book published in England's American colonies is Bay Psalm Book, a revised translation of the psalms

1640 Parliament denies Charles I's request for funds and is dismissed after three weeks (the Short Parliament)

1640 In need of funds for the Bishops' War in Scotland, Charles I summons parliament to Westminster

1640 The Dutch artist Gerrit Dou paints with exquisite precision and becomes leader of a group known as the 'fine painters'

1639 Covenanters seize control of Edinburgh and other Scottish towns, launching the conflict with England known as the Bishops' War

1639 The finances of the English king, Charles I, are in crisis, with his agents able to collect each year only a fraction of his demands

1639 Richard Fairbanks, given responsibility for delivering mail in Massachusetts, is allowed to charge a penny per letter

1638-1639 The Longford River is constructed to take water from the River Colne over Hounslow Heath to the Hampton Court Parks to supply water to the gardens.

1638 Riots erupt in Edinburgh, in response to the attempt by Charles I and Laud to impose a hierarchy of Anglican bishops

1638 Galileo's Discorsi, published in Leiden, lays the groundwork for mathematical physics

1638 A National Covenant, first signed in an Edinburgh churchyard, commits the Covenanters to oppose Charles I's reforms of the Church of Scotland

1638 The French build a trading station on the estuary of the Senegal river in west Africa

1637 War between English colonists and Pequot Indians brings disaster to the Pequots but safeguards the settlement of Connecticut

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1637 John Milton's Lycidas is published in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King

1637 Charles I and his archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, attempt to impose the full Anglican hierarchy on presbyterian Scotland

1637 Pierre Corneille's play Le Cid, popular with Paris audiences, hinges on the conflict between duty and love

1637 The first public opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, opens in Venice

1636 John Hampden refuses to pay ship money to Charles I, beginning a campaign that gradually wins wide support

1636 A painted ceiling by Rubens, celebrating the Stuart dynasty, is installed in the Banqueting House in Whitehall

1636 Rhode Island is founded by Roger Williams as a colony based on the principle of religious tolerance

1636 North America's first university is founded at Cambridge in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and soon receives a large bequest from John Harvard

1635 Charles I establishes Britain's Royal Mail, employing Thomas Witherings to set it up

1635 York Farm, now known as York House, is built for Andrew Pitcarne, Groom of the Bedchamber of Charles I.

1634 Rembrandt marries Saskia van Uylenburgh, who will feature in many of his paintings

1634 Francesco Borromini begins work on his intricate baroque masterpiece, the Monastery of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1634-43), in Rome

1634 Charles I demands ship money to increase his revenue, albeit in the absence of its conventional justification - a crisis of national defence

1634 A Passion play is performed for the first time at Oberammergau, in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation

1633 George Herbert's only volume of poems, The Temple, is published posthumously

1633 The four years of in Holland provide the first example of speculative frenzy in a capitalist market

1633 Williamsburg, first known as Middle Plantation, is founded in Virginia

1632 Shah Jahan begins building the Taj Mahal as a memorial for his wife, Mumtaz

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1632 Charles I acquires Raphael’s cartoons for The Acts of the Apostles (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), to be copied as tapestries in the workshops at Mortlake

1632 Van Dyck moves to London and becomes portrait painter to the British court and aristocracy

1632 Maryland is granted to Lord Baltimore as a haven for English Roman Catholics

1632 The Swedish army wins another convincing victory at Lützen, but Gustavus II dies leading a cavalry charge

1632 Shah Jahan orders that all recently built Hindu temples shall be destroyed, ending the Mughal tradition of religious tolerance

1632 The Inquisition convicts Galileo of heresy and he denies the truth of Copernicus - on being shown the instruments of torture

1631 Samuel Fortrey builds a house with gables, in the Dutch style, in what is now Kew Gardens.

1631 Rembrandt moves from his home town of Leiden to set up a studio in Amsterdam

1631 Gustavus II and the Swedish army win a conclusive victory over the imperial forces at Breitenfeld

1630 John Winthrop, arriving in Massachusetts, begins the journal that is eventually published as The History Of New England

1630 John Winthrop selects the site of Boston for the first Massachusetts settlement

1630 John Winthrop, appointed governor of the new Massachusetts Bay Company, sails from England with 700 settlers

1630 Rival Dutch, English and French colonies are established in Guiana, the northeast coast of south America

1629 Charles I dismisses his parliament in Westminster, and fails to summon another in the following eleven years

1629 The sculptor and architect Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini is given the task of adding the drama of baroque to the newly completed St Peter's in Rome

1629 After years of warfare, the truce of Altmark gives Estonia and most of Latvia to Sweden

1628 The Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn develops a life-long interest in self- portraiture

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1628 John Bunyan is born the son of a brass-worker in the Bedfordshire village of Elstow

1628 The English parliament's Petition of Right emphasizes the right of the citizen to be protected from royal tyranny

1628 William Harvey publishes a short book, De Motu Cordis, proving the circulation of the blood

1627 Claude Lorrain, basing himself like Poussin in Rome, paints classical landscapes suffused in light

1627 A British colony is founded in Barbados and within fifteen years has 18,000 settlers

1626 Ham House is expanded by William Murray, former ‘whipping boy’ to Charles I, and later created Earl of Dysart

1626 Charles I frustrates the English parliament's restrictions by raising taxes without summoning parliament for renewed approval

1626 Peter Minuit purchases the island of Manhattan from local Indians and calls the place New Amsterdam

1625 The English parliament attempts to clip the wings of the new king, Charles I, by placing an annual limit on his power to raise taxes

1625 On the death of his father, James VI and I, Charles I becomes king of England and Scotland

1625 The Dutch gradually exclude the Portuguese from the immensely lucrative trade in cloves from the Spice Islands (or Moluccas)

1625 Three brothers among the Dahomey people establish a long-lasting kingdom in the Bight of Benin

1625 Rubens completes a great narrative sequence of twenty-one paintings to celebrate the achievements of Marie de Médicis

1625 Ordnance factories in Sweden begin producing light but powerful field artillery, easy to move on the battlefield

1625 Gustavus II, king of Sweden, conscripts and trains an army far more mobile than those of his rivals

1624 Nicolas Poussin arrives in Rome, where he develops the tradition of French classicism

1624 The Japanese are forbidden to leave their country, or foreigners to enter, at the start

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of more than two centuries of almost total isolation

1623 Diego Velazquez becomes court painter to the king of Spain - a post which he will hold for the remaining thirty-seven years of his life

1623 John Heminge and Henry Condell publish thirty-six Shakespeare plays in the First Folio

1623 Tne English settlers in Virginia arrange a peace conference with the Powhatan Indians, using it as an opportunity to murder the Powhatan delegates

1622 The Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck begins a five-year stay, and a successful career as a portrait painter, in Genoa

1622 Bernini's youthful Pluto and Proserpina, suggesting soft flesh in cold marble, introduces the lively tradition of baroque sculpture

1622 A sudden attack by Powhatan Indians, led by their chieftain Opechancanough against the English colony at Jamestown, results in the death of more than 300 settlers

1621 John Donne, England's leading Metaphysical poet, becomes dean of St Paul's

1621 The is chartered to trade and found colonies anywhere along the entire American coast

1621 William Bradford, one of the Pilgrims from the Mayflower, is elected governor of the new Plymouth Colony

1621 The first English newspaper (Corante) appears, promising reports 'from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France'

1621 autumn The Mayflower settlers in Plymouth offer thanksgiving for their first harvest, eating turkeys in a celebration shared by local Indians

1620 William Bradford begins a journal of the Pilgrims' experience in New England, subsequently published (in 1856) as History of Plymouth Plantation

1620 December 26 The Pilgrims on the Mayflower select a place for their settlement, and give it the name of Plymouth, their port of departure in England

1620 In his Novum Organum Francis Bacon introduces a modern philosophy of experimental science

1620 November 11 Ten days after their first landfall, at Cape Cod, the adult males n the Mayflower agree a form of government for their new colony

1620 September 16 The Pilgrims (or Pilgrim Fathers), a group of 102 English settlers, sail

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in the Mayflower to the new world

1620 Delft becomes the centre for tin-glazed earthenware in nothern Europe, specializing in the blue-and-white Chinese style

1620 The battle of the White Mountain, to the west of Prague, ends the brief reign of Frederick V in Bohemia

1620 The Dutch painter Frans Hals displays exceptional brilliance in his group portraits, including several of the civic guards of Haarlem

1619 Dee’s house and estate are purchased by Francis Crane to establish the Mortlake Tapestry Works, with eighteen looms operated by Flemish weavers

1619 Jan Pieterszoon Coen destroys the town of Jakarta, on the coast of Java, and rebuilds it as a Dutch trading centre under the name Batavia

1619 The Protestant Frederick V (elector palatine of the Rhine) is elected king by the rebellious Bohemian nobles

1618 The 19-year-old Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck is employed by Rubens in Antwerp as his chief assistant

1618 The Teatro Farnese in Parma is the first to have a proscenium arch, framing perspective scenery painted on flat wings

1618 Bohemian nobles throw the Habsburg regents out of a window in the castle in Prague, thus triggering the Thirty Years' War

1617 Albrecht von Wallenstein uses his wife's fortune to mobilize a private army in support of the emperor Ferdinand II

1617 The treaty of Stolbova brings into Swedish hands the coast round the Gulf of Finland, ending Russian access to the Baltic

1616 William Shakespeare dies at New Place, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is buried in Holy Trinity Church

1616 John Smith publishes A Description of New England, an account of his exploration of the region in 1614

1616 Pocahontas fascinates Londoners when she arrives with her husband to publicize Jamestown

1616 Richelieu begins his public career, becoming a secretary of state to Marie de Médicis

1615 The Mughal school of painting reaches a peak of perfection in the reign of Jahangir

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1615 Sir Thomas Roe, the first British ambassador to India, arrives at the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir

1614 Pocahontas is baptized a Christian and marries John Rolfe, one of the Jamestown colonists

1614 An edict is passed expelling Jesuit missionaries from Japan, and ordering their converts to revert to Buddhism

1613 The American Indian princess Pocahontas is taken hostage by Jamestown colonists in the first Anglo-Powhatan war

1613 The British East India establishes a 'factory' (a secure warehouse for the storing of Indian goods) at Surat, on the west coast

1613 The Globe catches fire during a performance of Shakespeare's last play, Henry VIII

1613 Michael Romanov is elected tsar, beginning a new dynasty on the Russian throne

1613 Galileo publishes his evidence, from sun spots, proving Copernicus right and Ptolemy wrong on the solar system

1612 The establishment of a Baptist church in London is a defining moment for the Baptist sect within Christianity

1611 Shakespeare's last completed play, The Tempest, is performed

1611 Henry Hudson, after wintering in Hudson Bay, is set adrift in an open boat by his mutinous crew

1610 The first documented Caesarian section in which the mother survives

1610 A 3 storey brick mansion set in 74 acres, later known as Cambridge Park, is built by Sir Humphrey Lynd.

1610 Sir Thomas Vavasour builds Ham House

1610 After the assassination of Henry IV, his wife Marie de Médicis becomes regent for the 9-year-old Louis XIII

1610 Henry IV is assassinated in a Paris street by a Roman Catholic, François Ravaillac

1610 Galileo, with his new powerful telescope, observes the moons of Jupiter and spots moving on the surface of the sun

1610 A flintlock designed in France (possibly by Marin Le Bourgeoys) becomes the standard firing mechanism for muskets

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1609 Shakespeare's sonnets, written ten years previously, are published

1609 News sheets published in Augsburg and Strasbourg become the first known newspapers

1609 Castaways from an English vessel reach Bermuda, which becomes the first British island in the new world

1609 A law is passed expelling the Moriscos from Spain, with the result that some 300,000 are shipped to north Africa

1609 The Blue Mosque, commissioned by Ahmed I, begins to rise in Istanbul like a twin to the nearby Santa Sophia

1609 Galileo improves on the Dutch telescope (and doubles his salary by presenting one to his employer)

1609 Johannes Kepler, in Prague, puts forward the radical proposition that the planets move in elliptical rather than circular orbits

1609 Henry Hudson reaches the inlet of New York Bay and explores the river now known by his name

1608 John Smith claims (many years later) that when captured by Indians he was saved from execution by Pocahontas, daughter of the chief

1608 A shipload of Puritans, among them some of the future Pilgrim Fathers, sail from Boston in Lincolnshire to seek religious freedom in Holland

1608 Rubens returns from Italy to Antwerp, where he soon establishes Europe's most successful and prolific studio

1608 Quebec is founded by Samuel de Champlain as a centre for the French fur trade

1608 A second false Dmitry marches on Moscow, to be followed by a third in 1612

1608 A lucky accident reveals the principle of the telescope to a spectacle maker, Hans Lippershey. In the Dutch town of Middelburg

1608 The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens completes an altarpiece in Rome which is an early masterpiece of the baroque

1607 The Jamestown settlers meet an unfriendly reception from the local Powhatan Indians, having to use their muskets to beat off an attack within two weeks of their arrival

1607 Colonists establish the first lasting British settlement in the new world, at

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Jamestown

1607 The earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel sail from Ireland with their families, in the event known as the Flight of the Earls

1607 Claudio Monteverdi presents Orfeo, the first opera to win a lasting place in the international repertory

1606 The satirical voice of the English playwright Ben Jonson is heard to powerful effect in Volpone

1605 The Gunpowder Plot, attempting murder and treason, severely damages the Catholic cause in Britain

1605 Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes publishes the first part of his satirically romantic novel

1605 On the death of Akbar, his son Jahangir succeeds to the Mughal throne

1605 Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I

1604 William Shakespeare's name appears among the actors in a list of the King's Men

1604 Bushy Park has by now acquired its familiar name, from the thorn bushes planted to protect the sapling oaks from the deer

1604 James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years

1604 Annibale Carracci completes an influential ceiling fresco in the Farnese palace in Rome

1604 The first false Dmitry marches into Russia with a Polish army to claim the throne

1604 The British king James I launches a blistering attack on the smoking of tobacco, which he considers a loathsome custom

1603 The accession of James I and VI to the throne of England brings the union of the crowns of England and Scotland

1603 James VI of Scotland inherits peacefully the crown of his English cousin Elizabeth, and becomes James I of England

1603 The warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu is awarded the title of shogun, beginning nearly three centuries of the Tokugawa shogunate

1603 Geneva wins independence from the duchy of Savoy, in the treaty of St Julien, after

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repelling a midnight assault on the city

1603 March 23 Queen Elizabeth I dies at the age of 69 in Richmond Palace

1602 The is founded, with a tax-free monopoly of the eastern trade for twenty-one years

1601 Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age

1600 Electricity is given its name (in the Latin phrase vis electrica) by the English physician, William Gilbert

1600 Britain's East India Company is established when Elizabeth I grants a charter to a 'Company of Merchants trading into the East Indies'

1600 A performance in the Oratory in Rome, with music by Emilio de' Cavalieri, is in effect the first oratorio

1600 William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth, concludes that the earth is a magnet and coins the term 'magnetic pole'

1600 The Yoruba develop an extensive empire centred on Oyo in southern Nigeria

1599 The Globe, where many of Shakespeare's plays are first performed, is built on Bankside in London

1598 The Edict of Nantes secures the civil rights of France's Protestants, the Huguenots

1598 James VI of Scotland argues in an anonymous book that kings, appointed by God, are above human law

1598 Shah Abbas builds up Isfahan as a spectacular new capital of the Persian empire

1598 A manuscript, the Guildford Book of Court, uses the word 'creckett' for a game played in a Guildford school

1597 Dafne is performed in Florence, becoming the first example of a new art form - opera

1596 A flush toilet is illustrated in an English pamphlet, The Metamorphosis of Ajax by John Harrington

1596 Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin begins work classifying 6000 plants on a new binomial system of nomenclature

1596 Tycho Brahe enters the service of the emperor Rudolf II in Prague, where he invites Johannes Kepler to join him

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1595 The first Dutch expedition round the Cape reaches Java and secures trading agreements

1595 A year after Mercator's death, his son publishes a bound collection of his maps with the title Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations

1595 The writings of Matteo Ricci introduce Kung Fu Tzu to Europe under a Latin version of his name - Confucius

1594 Willem Barents sets off on the first of his three expeditions to find a passage to the east through the waters north of Russia

1593 Henry IV becomes a Catholic so as to secure Paris and the throne of France

1592 After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III

1591 Queen Elizabeth I grants Jane Lovell, widow of John, the ongoing rights to his offices in Richmond Palace

1590 Queen Elizabeth I instals in Richmond Palace a flushing water closet (or toilet) recently invented by Sir John Harington

1590 The dome of St Peter's is finished, completing nearly a century of construction on Europe's largest church

1590 The dome of St Peter's is finished, completing nearly a century of construction on Europe's largest church

1590 Zacharias Janssen, a spectacle maker in the Dutch town of Middelburg, creates the first microscope

1590 English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene

1590 Arjan, the fifth Sikh guru, builds many gurdwaras and commences the holy city of Amritsar

1590 An English ship, the first to arrive at Roanoke Island since 1587, finds no remaining trace of the settlers or their settlement

1590 Serfdom is introduced in Russia by Boris Godunov, whose measures tie the peasants to the land

1590 Royal (or real) tennis is so popular in France that there are now said to be 250 courts in Paris alone

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1589 An English clergyman, William Lee, develops the world's first industrial machinery, to knit stockings

1588 The tactics used against the Armada reveal that the sailing ships themselves have become fighting machines, as men-of-war

1588 The more nimble English fleet destroys the galleons of the Spanish Armada, introducing a new kind of naval warfare

1588 Seven provinces of the northern Netherlands consider themselves a new republic - the United Provinces

1588 The shogun's Tea Master awards a gold seal with the one word raku ('felicity') to a beautiful bowl, thus naming Japan's most famous ware

1588 The House of Orange becomes the leading family of the new Dutch republic

1587 16-year-old Abbas I, subsequently one of the greatest of shahs, inherits the throne of Persia

1587 Nicholas Hilliard paints the delightful miniature known simply as Young Man among Roses

1587 Francis Drake sails into a crowded Cadiz harbour and destroys some thirty Spanish ships

1587 Virginia Dare becomes the first English child to be born in America, on Roanoke Island

1587 A new group of English settlers arrives at Roanoke Island and makes a second attempt at a settlement

1587 Venice opens the first modern bank (the Banco della Piazza di Rialto) for safe deposits and credit transfers

1587 Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama

1587 Mary Queen of Scots, implicated in the Babington plot, is beheaded in Fotheringay castle

1586 Anthony Babington is involved in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne

1585 The English artist John White paints the everyday life of the Secotan Indians of America

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1585 Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, is settled by the first English colonists in America – with disastrous results

1585 Catholics are now the martyrs in England, their numbers almost matching the Protestant martyrs of the previous reign

1585 England's queen Elizabeth sends 6000 troops to support the Dutch rebels against Spain

1584 The local tribe of Indians, the Secotan, welcome the English visitors, offering them a profusion of meat, fish, fruit and vegetables in return for hatchets and

1584 Two English ships, sent on reconnaissance by Walter Raleigh, reach Roanake Island off the coast of North Carolina

1583 John Dee sets off for six years of travel in Europe, during which his laboratory and library in Mortlake is plundered by former associates and rivals

1583 Humphrey Gilbert claims Newfoundland on behalf of England's queen Elizabeth

1583 The Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrives in China, and becomes the first western student of Chinese civilization

1582 The 18-year-old William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon- Avon

1582 The new and more accurate Gregorian calendar is introduced by Gregory XIII in the papal states

1581 Finland is granted the status of a separate grand duchy within the realm of Sweden

1581 Tasso, in Gerusalemme Liberata ('Jerusalem Liberated'), turns the first crusade into a romantic epic

1581 The first dramatic ballet, the Balet Comique de la Reine, is presented during French wedding festivities

1581 In the Oath of Abjuration the northern provinces of the Netherlands formally reject the rule of the Spanish king, Philip II

1580 William Chamberlen invents the obstetrical forceps

1580 French author Michel de Montaigne, in his library tower, produces Europe's first volume of essays – published in this year under the simple title Essais

1580 Francis Drake returns to England after his three-year voyage round the world and is knighted by Queen Elizabeth on board his Golden Hind

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1580 The first Jesuit missionaries arrive in England, with Edmund Campion among their number

1580 A Spanish army marches into Portugal to claim the crown for the king of Spain, Philip II

1580 Five tribal troups form a League of Five Nations, commonly known as the Iroquois League or Confederacy, against their common enemy the Huron

1579 Queen Elizabeth buys the lease of Barn Elms for her spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham

1579 The Union of Arras and the Union of Utrecht split the Netherlands into Catholic and Protestant camps

1579 Francis Drake seizes a Spanish vessel laden with gold and silver in the Pacific, formerly a safe area for Spain

1577 Domenikos Theotokopoulos moves to Spain, where he becomes known as El Greco

1577 Francis Drake sails from Plymouth, heading west for the Pacific and the East Indies

1576 Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe builds Uraniborg, on the island of Hven, and makes it the world's leading observatory

1576 James Burbage builds London's first theatre and calls it the Theatre

1576 The Pacification of Ghent unites all the provinces of the Netherlands in opposition to Spain

1575 Soft-paste porcelain, in imitation of true porcelain from China, is successfully created for the Medici in Florence

1575 English sailor and slave-trader John Hawkins turns the top-heavy carrack into the more seaworthy galleon

1575 The armies of Spain develop a powerful version of the ancient phalanx, which becomes known as the Spanish square

1575 Stefan Báthory, prince of Transylvania, is elected king of Poland

1574 The Ottoman empire finally asserts control over the north African coast, in the footsteps of Muslim pirates

1573 The city of Alkmaar is saved when the Dutch breach their own dikes, threatening the Spanish troops with death by drowning

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1573 Venice cedes the island of Cyprus to the Turks, in spite of the Christian victory at Lepanto two years earlier

1573 Oda Nobunaga takes power into his own hands, after ruling for a while through the Ashikaga shogun

1573 William of Orange declares himself a Calvinist and assumes the leadership of the united provinces of the Netherlands

1573 The tomb in Delhi of the Mughal emperor Humayun introduces the shape of dome which characterizes his dynasty's architecture

1572 Sea beggars seize the town of Brill and raise the flag of William of Orange (also known as William the Silent)

1572 Luis de Camoëns publishes The Lusiads, the poem which becomes Portugal's national epic

1572 A massacre of French Protestants, known as the Huguenots, begins in Paris on St Bartholomew's Day

1571 John Dee brings back from Lorraine a cartload of special instruments for alchemy, to be installed in his laboratory at Mortlake

1571 Spanish and Venetian galleys defeat the Turks in the battle of Lepanto

1571 Galleys are rowed into battle for the last time at Lepanto, ending a fighting career of some 2500 years

1571 Roberto di Ridolfi, a Florentine banker, coordinates a scheme to win the English throne for Mary Queen of Scots

1571 The Philippines and its governor general are placed under the authority of the Spanish governor of New Spain, ruling from Mexico City

1571 Akbar builds his new palace of Fatehpur Sikri close to the shrine of a Sufi saint

1571 The Spanish governor general, Legazpi, makes his capital at Manila,and names the surrounding islands the Philippines after Philip II

1570 Pope Pius V excommunicates the English queen, Elizabeth I, causing a severe crisis of loyalty for her Catholic subjects

1570 Palladio publishes I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura ('The Four Books of Architecture'), which include his influential designs for villas

1570 The Ashanti establish a powerful kingdom in present-day Ghana, with their capital at Kumasi

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1570 Privateers frequent the Spanish main to plunder the richly laden caravels on their way home to Europe

1569 Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator publishes a map of the world, using the projection now known by his name

1569 A rebellion in the north of England aims to put Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne

1568 Mary Queen of Scots flees across the border to seek the help of her English cousin, Elizabeth, but finds herself kept under close guard

1568 Discovery of the Solomon Islands by a Spanish ship prompts interest in a possible Terra Australis Incognita ('unknown southern land')

1567 On the removal of Mary from the Scottish throne, her one-year-old son succeeds her as James VI

1567 The events of this year give the Protestant nobility the occasion and opportunity of deposing Mary Queen of Scots

1567 A casket of letters seems to incriminate Mary Queen of Scots herself in the murder of her husband, Darnley

1567 The duke of Alba introduces a reign of terror in the Spanish Netherlands, by means of a tribunal known as the Council of Blood

1567 Darnley is murdered, almost certainly at the instigation of Mary Queen of Scots' lover, Bothwell, whom she marries just three months later

1567 The Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be followed by the complete Bible in 1588

1566 The mathematician, astrologer and alchemist John Dee moves to a house in Mortlake on the site of the building now known as the Queen’s Head

1566 Mary Queen of Scots' husband Darnley is treacherously involved in the murder of her secretary, Rizzio

1566 Mary Queen of Scots' secretary, David Rizzio, is dragged from her presence and stabbed to death

1565 Mary Queen of Scots marries her Catholic cousin, Henry Darnley

1565 Pieter Brueghel the Elder depicts biblical events taking place among the peasants of the Netherlands countryside

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1564 Gabriele Fallopia invents the condom

1564 Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months

1564 The bishop of Transylvania, Ferenc Dávid, preaches that only God the Father is divine, launching the Unitarian faith

1563 The Northern Seven Years' War breaks out between Denmark and Sweden

1563 Philip II begins construction of the palace and monastery known as the Escorial

1561 Mary Queen of Scots returns from France to Edinburgh, and to an inevitable clash with John Knox

1560 A year after Mary has become queen of France, her husband Francis II dies

1560 Tobacco is grown in Europe's physic gardens for its medicinal qualities

1560 A book to teach good handwriting is published by Gianfrancesco Cresci, with examples engraved on copper plates

1559 A national synod of France's Protestants, the Huguenots, is convened in Paris

1559 John Knox returns to Scotland from Geneva and inspires the Protestants to march on Edinburgh

1558 With its strong French connection, the Scottish royal name of Stewart begins to be spelt Stuart (there being no 'w' in native French words)

1558 Mary Queen of Scots marries the heir to the French throne, who a year later succeeds as Francis II

1558 William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, becomes Elizabeth's principal secretary - and remains in the post for forty years

1558 Elizabeth I succeeds peacefully to the throne of England, after the turmoil of Mary's Catholic reign

1557 The Portuguese establish a trading post on Macao, a small peninsula off the south coast of China

1557 Sinan completes his masterpiece, the mosque of Suleiman I in Istanbul

1556 The division by Charles V of his territories means that there are now two Habsburg empires, Austrian and Spanish

1549 Thomas Cranmer is burnt at the stake in Oxford, after reasserting his Protestant

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beliefs

1556 Humayun dies and Akbar, the greatest of the Mughal emperors, inherits the throne at the age of thirteen

1556 Charles V abdicates, handing the Netherlands and Spain to his son Philip and the title of Holy Roman emperor to his brother Ferdinand

1555 The Protestant martyrs, though few in number, ensure the reputation of Bloody Mary in English history

1555 Civil war within India enables Humayun to win a battle at Sirhind and recover the Mughal throne

1555 The Peace of Augsburg achieves a compromise which for a while solves the religious tensions deriving from the Reformation

1555 The Muscovy Company is granted a monopoly by the crown to trade with Russia, as the first of the English chartered companies

1554 Mary I arrests her younger sister Elizabeth under suspicion of complicity in the Wyatt Rebellion, but she can find no proof

1554 Thomas Wyatt raises a Protestant rebellion in Yorkshire and marches south in a failed attempt to depose the English queen, Mary I

1554 Mary I causes grave offence in England by her marriage to the Catholic heir to the king of Spain

1553 Mary I succeeds to the English throne, and devotes her energies to the restoration of the Catholic faith

1550 Pierre de Ronsard publishes the first four books of his Odes

1550 Spanish galleons assemble each year at Portobelo to deliver European goods and to ship home the metals of Latin America

1550 The tinderbox provides a new way of making fire - with just flint, steel and tinder

1550 The Mongols, increasingly dominated by their neighbours in Manchuria, submit to them and are accepted by the Manchus as vassals

1550 Africans, bought in the Portuguese trading posts of west Africa, are shipped across the Atlantic as slaves

1549 Joachim du Bellay publishes a manifesto for the group of new French poets who become known as the Pléiade

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1549 The first version of the English prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer

1549 The first Portuguese governor general of Brazil selects Bahia (now Salvador) as his capital

1549 Brazil becomes a Portuguese royal province, under the control of a governor general

1548 La Paz is founded on the trade route between Lima and the newly discovered silver mines at Potosi

1547 John Knox is captured in St Andrews and is sent to serve in the French fleet as a galley slave

1547 The first book describing the game of draughts, or checkers, is published in Spain

1547 Ivan IV is crowned tsar of Russia and becomes known as Ivan the Terrible

1547 On the death of Henry VIII his 10-year-old son becomes king of England as Edward VI

1547 Hungary is divided, by agreement between the Turkish sultan Suleiman I and the Habsburg ruler Ferdinand I

1546 David Beaton, the archbishop of St Andrews, burns a leading Protestant, George Wishart, as a heretic and is murdered in retaliation

1545 A council of the Roman Catholic church is convened in Trent, to establish the tenets of the Counter-Reformation

1545 The Italian players of the commedia dell'arte first feature in the records in this year

1545 Ambroise Paré, the greatest surgeon of his day, publishes an account of how to treat gunshot wounds

1545 3000 Waldenses are massacred as heretics in the villages of Provence

1545 Rich seams of silver are discovered at Potosi, in modern Bolivia

1543 Humayun, driven west into Afghanistan by Sher Shah, loses his family's new inheritance in India

1543 Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius publishes a seven-volume work which for the first time lays bare human anatomy

1543 The first Europeans reach Japan by accident, blown ashore in a storm

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1543 Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus publishes a book suggesting that the earth moves round the sun

1542 A one-week-old Scottish infant, daughter of James V, inherits the throne as Mary Queen of Scots

1542 Henry VIII's fourth wife, Catherine Howard, is beheaded on a charge of adultery with Thomas Culpeper

1542 Pope Paul III establishes the Roman Inquisition, with the specific task of fighting against the Protestant heresy

1542 Francis Xavier reaches Goa, at the start of the great mission to the east that will last the nine years until his death

1542 New Laws are passed in Spain, in an attempt to protect the Indians on the encomiendas of Spanish America

1541 Francis Xavier, companion of Ignatius Loyola and the first missionary of the Counter-Reformation, sets sail from Lisbon

1541 Suleiman I takes Buda (now Budapest), and by 1547 the Turks occupy almost the whole of Hungary

1541 Protestant reformer John Calvin settles in Geneva and submits the city to a strict Christian rule

1540 Nicolas Oursian creates an astronomical clock for Henry VIII at Hampton Court

1540 Francisco Vasquez de Coronado penetrates far north and west of Texas in an expedition searching for gold

1540 Pope Paul III establishes Ignatius Loyola and his followers as the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits

1539 The Great Bible, commissioned by Henry VIII for use in every Anglican church, is published

1537 Jane Seymour dies twelve days after giving birth to Henry VIII's heir, the future Edward VI

1537 Jane Seymour gives birth to Henry VIII's long-awaited male heir (the future Edward VI)

1537 With the end of the siege of Cuzco, and the flight of Manco Inca, the Spanish have full control of Peru

1536 Henry VIII encloses land to the north of Hampton Court Palace as a deer park, and

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plants it with acorns to provide oak for the navy

1536 Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour, eleven days after the execution of Anne Boleyn

1536 Henry VIII's queen, Anne Boleyn, is beheaded in the Tower of London on unsubstantiated charges of adultery

1536 The reign of Christian III begins three centuries in which Norway is administered as little more than an annexe of Denmark

1536 Manco Inca begins a siege of the Spaniards in Cuzco that lasts for a year

1536 Christian III seizes the wealth of Danish churches and monasteries, before turning his attention to those of Norway

1536 A Water Gallery, over 170ft long, is constructed and incorporates a landing stage for the King's Barge at Hampton Court with a Pleasure Gallery above

1536 William Tyndale is captured in Antwerp, condemned as a heretic and strangled at the stake

1536 Wales is merged within the English kingdom as a principality

1536 Henry VIII begins the process of gathering in the wealth of England's monasteries

1535 Henry modernises the Chapel at Hampton Court and adds the magnificent ceiling

1535 Thomas More refuses to take the oath accepting the Act of Supremacy and is beheaded

1535 Cartier, welcomed by the Huron Indians, gives their island in the St Lawrence river the name of Montreal

1534 Paris wakes up to find Protestant placards all over the place, mocking the sacrament of the mass

1534 The Portuguese force the local ruler to cede to them the island of Bombay

1534 Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy forces prominent figures in English public life to accept him on oath as head of the Church of England

1534 French explorer Jacques Cartier charts the Gulf of St Lawrence and, in 1525, explores up the river as far as Montreal

1533 The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, makes Titian his court painter (an arrangement continued by Philip II)

1533 Anne Boleyn has a child (the future Elizabeth I) but not of the sex her husband

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wants

1533 Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, declares Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon null and void

1533 The Spanish conquistadors capture and sack the Inca capital of Cuzco, high in the Andes

1533 Although the ransom has been paid, Atahualpa is executed by the Spaniards — who ensure that he dies a Christian

1533 In a secret ceremony Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn, though he has not yet succeeded in divorcing Catherine of Aragon

1532 Atahualpa agrees to buy his freedom from the Spaniards with a room full of gold and another of silver

1532 Pizarro and his tiny force ambush and massacre the Inca court in Cajamarca, capturing Atahualpa himself alive

1532 The Privy Garden at Hampton Court is completed and is divided up into squares by 180 posts topped with heraldic beasts and is said to resemble a chess board in red, white and green

1532 François Rabelais publishes Pantagruel, the first to appear of his five books about the giant Pantagruel and his father Gargantua

1532 Henry rebuilds the Great Hall at Hampton Court, the first in a sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings

1531 Francisco Pizarro leads 168 men, with about 30 horses, into the territory of the Inca empire

1531 Zwingli is killed at Kappel in a battle between Protestant and Catholic cantons

1531 The Protestant princes of Germany form the defensive League of Schmalkalden

1531 The Aztec Virgin of Guadalupe appears to an Indian near Mexico City and tells him she is 'one of his kind'

1530 King Henry VIII’s barge moors in the creek leading from the River Thames to Kew Pond

1530 The first Mughal emperor, Babur, dies in India and is succeeded by his son, Humayun

1530 German botanist Otto Brunfels publishes Living images of plants, the first serious work of natural history with printed illustrations

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1530 Atahualpa defeats and kills his half-brother Huáscar, thus winning control of the entire Inca empire

1530 The Augsburg Confession, presented by Melanchthon to the imperial diet, defines the Lutheran faith

1530 Charles V gives Malta to the Knights of St John at an annual rental of one falcon

1530 Francisco Pizarro sails from Panama to attempt the conquest of Peru

1530 Ahmad ibn Ibrahim leads Muslim Somalis in a holy war against Christian Ethiopia, destroying churches and shrines

1529 Plans are laid for the King's new gardens at Hampton Court including the Privy Garden, Pond Yard and Mount Garden

1529 Henry's first phase of building at Hampton Court includes the construction of all the rooms required for operations of the kitchens, a Council Chamber and private rooms for himself

1529 Protestant reformers Luther and Zwingli disagree at Marburg on the nature of the Eucharist

1529 The 'Protestation' of various princes and imperial cities at Speyer identifies them as Protestants

1529 After the fall of Wolsey, Henry VIII appoints Thomas More as his Lord Chancellor

1528 In a desperate attempt to retain royal favour, when suspected by the king of opposing his divorce, Cardinal Wolsey gives his spectacular Hampton Court Palace to Henry VIII

1528 Henry VIII orders Wolsey to vacate Hampton Court after Wolsey has opposed the King's divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon

1528 Discussion of Henry VIII's proposed divorce hinges on rival verses from the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy and Leviticus

1527 Gustavus I of Sweden fills his coffers by appropriating the property of Catholic churches and monasteries

1527 Victory at Khanua, over a Hindu confederation of Rajput rulers, brings Babur a tenuous control over most of northwest India

1527 Francis I begins to transform Fontainebleau into a palace, employing artists who establish the mannerist school of Fontainebleau

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1527 Pope Clement VII hides in Castel Sant'Angelo while Rome is sacked by German mercenaries

1526 Hans Holbein the Younger pays his first visit to England, and stays with Thomas More in Chelsea

1526 The Hungarian king, Louis II, is killed in battle at Mohacs, where the Turks win a crushing victory

1526 In a battle at Panipat Babur defeats the sultan of Delhi, launching the Mughal empire in India

1525 Lucas Cranach's studio in Wittenberg has a profitable line in naked female figures from mythology

1525 The conquistadors, settling on land granted to them after the conquest, begin the long process of European emigration to America

1525 Muslims throughout Spain are ordered to convert to Christianity or to leave the kingdom

1525 Thomas Müntzer leads the rebels in the Peasant War, to the profound displeasure of Luther

1525 Conrad Grebel baptises an adult, causing outrage in Protestant Zurich

1525 Ruling respectively from Cuzco and Quito, Huáscar and Atahualpa compete for the empire of their father, Huayna Capac

1525 The Inca emperor, Huayna Capac, dies in an epidemic of a western disease, smallpox

1525 Luther, a former friar, marries Catherine von Bora, a former nun who has just emerged from her convent

1525 The French king, Francis I, is taken prisoner by the Spanish at the battle of Pavia

1524 William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English

1523 The Vasa dynasty in Sweden begins with the seizing of the throne by Gustavus I

1523 Hans Sachs, popular poet and master singer, describes Luther as the Wittenberg nightingale

1522 One surviving ship of Magellan's fleet, the Victoria, returns to Sanlucar, in Spain, with Sebastian Cano in command

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1522-1528 The second phase of Wolsey's work at Hampton Court includes the creation of three suites fit for Royal occupation, a suite of rooms for himself and a magnificant Chapel

1522 Huldreich Zwingli eats sausage in Lent in Zurich, launching the Swiss Reformation

1522 Outlawed by the Edict of Worms, Luther lives secretly in the Wartburg as Junker Georg

1521 Ignatius of Loyola, recovering from a wound received as a soldier at Pamplona, is inspired by reading the lives of the saints

1521 After a little more than a year Cortes recaptures Tenochtitlan and finally establishes Spanish control over Mexico

1521 The Turkish sultan, Suleiman I, marches into the kingdom of Hungary and captures Belgrade

1521 Luther bears witness to a Protestant conscience, stating at Worms: 'Here I stand, I can not do otherwise.'

1521 Ferdinand Magellan is killed in the Philippines, in a skirmish with natives

1521 Luther travels to the German city of Worms to present his case to an imperial diet

1521 Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan crosses the Pacific in ninety-nine days and reaches Guam

1521 Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther after he has refused to recant

1520 Mannerism develops in Italy in the work of the painters Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino

1520 Eighty distinguished Swedish citizens are executed together on the main square, in what becomes known as the Stockholm Bloodbath

1520 Thomas Cromwell’s sister Katherine and her husband Morgan Williams move into the Mortlake house inherited from Morgan’s uncle John Williams

1518 Philipp Melanchthon joins the Wittenberg university to teach Greek and inspires Luther to translate the New Testament

1517 Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg

1517 The local sale of indulgences by Johann Tetzel outrages a friar teaching in Wittenberg, Martin Luther

1517 Leonardo da Vinci moves to France, on the invitation of Francis I

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1517 The last Abbasid caliph, captured by the Ottoman Turks, is taken as a prisoner to Istanbul - ending the authentic line of 'successors' to Muhammad

1517 The Ottoman sultan, Selim I, captures Cairo and ends Mameluke rule in the middle east

1516 Erasmus publishes an influential edition of the New Testament in its original Greek

1516 Ariosto, in Orlando Furioso, tells of Roland's madness when he is abandoned by the pagan princess Angelica

1516 The original ghetto is established as a district to which the Jews of Venice are confined

1516 Catherine of Aragon gives birth to a daughter, Mary, who becomes the only one of her six children to live beyond infancy

1516 The death of Ferdinand II results in Spain becoming part of the Habsburg empire, under the rule of Charles V (as Charles I of Spain)

1515 The Spanish complete the conquest of Cuba and establish the town of Havana

1515 The king of France, Francis I, wins a dramatic victory at Marignano and captures Milan

1515 Louis XII is succeeded on the French throne by his cousin and son-in-law, Francis I

1514-1522 Wolsey's first phase of work at Hampton Court adds a whole new courtyard of accomodation, Base Court, and an imposing Great Gatehouse

1514 The Portuguese capture Hormuz and establish a garrison to control the Gulf of Oman

1514 Thomas Wolsey begins to build himself a palace at Hampton Court, but will later consider it politic to give it to Henry VIII

1514 Thomas Wolsey leases Hampton Court from Henry Daubeney

1513 Eucharius Rösslin publishes the first textbook for midwives, later translated into English as The byrthe of mankynde

1513 On the death of his father at Flodden, the one-year-old James V becomes king of Scotland

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1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa reaches the Pacific coast and claims the ocean for the king of Spain

1513 James IV of Scotland dies at Flodden, in the disastrous defeat of his army by the English

1512 The Portuguese make treaties in the Moluccas (or Spice Islands), to trade in cloves and nutmeg

1511 The Portuguese take control of Malacca, in the Malay peninsula, as a base for trade further east

1511 The earliest surviving curling stone, discovered in Scotland, dates from this year

1510 The painter Giorgione dies after a short but extremely influential life in Venice

1510 The startling colour contrasts in Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling anticipate one of the main characteristics of Italian mannerism

1510 The Portuguese seize Goa and make it their colonial capital in India

1510 Giorgione and Titian introduce the richness of colour which characterizes the high Renaissance style in Venice

1510 Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism

1509 December 25 The newly crowned and recently married king, Henry VIII, spends his first Christmas with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, at Richmond

1509 On the death of his father, and as the result of the death of his elder brother Arthur, Henry VIII becomes king of England

1509 Raphael begins work on the frescoes in the pope's apartment in the Vatican, known as the Stanze ('Rooms')

1508 Raphael is summoned to Rome by Julius II and is given a major commission for frescoes

1508 Michelangelo begins work in Rome on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel

1507 The editor of a pamphlet proposes that the recently found continent should be named America after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci

1506 Julius II, together with the architect Bramante, lays the foundation stone for the new St Peter's

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1505 St Peter’s is rebuilt, retaining some Norman work in the chancel from the original ‘chapelry’

1505 Pope Julius II summons Michelangelo to Rome to create the pope's own elaborately sculpted tomb

1505 Leonardo captures the enigmatic smile of Lisa Gherardini, known now as the Mona Lisa

1505 The Portuguese establish a presence in Sri Lanka, trading in the island's crop of cinammon

1504 Babur captures Kabul, making it and eastern Afghanistan the first possession of the Mughal empire

1503 The Portuguese set up a trading post on the east African island of Zanzibar

1503 Hieronymus Bosch paints the most detailed of his exotically surreal canvases, The Garden of Earthly Delights

1503 The marriage of James IV, king of Scotland, to Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, leads a century later to the Union of the Crowns

1502 Vasco da Gama wins a trading treaty for Portuguese merchants after bombarding the Indian port of Calicut into submission

1501 The rebuilding of Henry VII's palace is largely completed, after an impressively short time

1501 Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci sets sail from Lisbon to explore to the south of the New World

1501 Michelangelo begins work in Florence on a tall thin slab of marble, which he transforms into David

1501 The 14-year-old Ismail I is enthroned as shah of a new Persian dynasty, the Safavids

1500-1650 A number of noblemen and wealthy merchants build their villas around Kew Green, including Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester, closely associated with Queen Elizabeth I. The only villa to survive from this period is the present Kew Palace built in the Dutch style for Samuel Fortrey.

1500 Ceramic artists in Italy decorate large majolica dishes with scenes of narrative history, giving this style the name istoriato

1500 In Cuzco's great temple, the sacrifices are usually of llamas, occasionally of humans

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1500 The Salic law, preventing inheritance of the throne by or through a woman, is by now accepted as a fundamental law of France

1500 European diseases bring death on a massive scale to an American population that has no immunity

1500 The Portuguese establish trading posts in east Africa, on the coast of Mozambique

1500 The manor of East Sheen and West Hall is carved out of the manor of Mortlake, including all that part of Kew that now lies between the river, the A316 and the District railway

1500 The Inca empire has about 25,000 miles of well-serviced roads, designed for caravans of llamas

1500 Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral, with a fleet of thirteen ships, makes landfall in Brazil

1500 The female mamakuna and the male yanakuna are selected in childhood to serve the Inca state

1500 Leonardo argues that fossils in rocks far above the sea imply not the effects of the Flood but a change in the level of an ancient sea bed

1500 Faenza becomes the main centre for the production of the Italian tin-glazed earthenware known as majolica

1500 The first modern lock gates are installed on a canal in Milan, probably designed by Leonardo da Vinci

1500 The first watches, made in Nuremberg, are spherical clocks about three in diameter, worn usually on a ribbon round the neck

1500 Nanak, the first of the Sikh gurus, takes to the road as a wandering teacher

1500 The first etchings are printed in Augsburg, from iron plates

1500 Even the remote city of Machu Picchu, on its peak above the jungle, is built in the massively precise Inca style of masonry

1500 The lively realism of Kamal-ud-din Bihzad lays the basis of both the Persian and the Mughal schools of painting

1500 The people of Benin begin a lasting tradition of sculpture in brass, melted down from objects brought by traders

1499 After three feeble attempts to invade England, Perkin Warbeck is captured by Henry

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VII (in 1497) and is hanged at Tyburn

1499 The Swiss (or Swabian) War ends with the treaty of Basel, bringing effective recognition of Swiss independence from the Habsburg empire

1499 24-year-old Michelangelo provides for St Peter's in Rome an exquisite Pietà – the Virgin holding on her lap the dead Christ

1498 Vasco da Gama reaches the southern coast of India, at Calicut, after sailing across the Indian Ocean from east Africa

1498 The Florentine mob, weary of puritanism, attacks the convent of San Marco and drags Savonarola away to be hanged and burnt

1497 John Cabot, searching for a trade route to China, probably reaches Newfoundland

1497 Henry VII commissions the Italian navigator John Cabot to cross the Atlantic in search of new territories for England

1497 Savonarola, in the carnival before Lent, urges the people of Florence to throw playing cards and lewd images on a great bonfire of vanities

1496 Philip, heir to Austria, marries Joanna, a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, in the second of the great Habsburg marital alliances

1496 Diego Columbus, brother of the explorer, establishes the first secure Spanish colony at Santo Domingo

1495 The type faces known as roman and italic are created in Venice by the printers Nicolas Jenson and Aldus Manutius

1495 Dürer, the first great artist to tackle the complexities of printing, becomes a master of woodcut and engraving

1495 Charles VIII captures Naples in February and is crowned there in May, but is forced back across the Alps before the end of the year

1494 Piero de' Medici and his brothers flee from Florence, after a mob ransacks the Medici palace

1494 Charles VIII, king of France, marches through the Alps with an army of 30,000, to claim the throne of Naples

1494 In negotiations about the New World at Tordesillas, the king of Portugal insists on a new demarcation line which later brings him Brazil

1493 John Williams, a brewer, acquires half an acre of land beside the Thames in Mortlake and builds on it a house subsequently known as Cromwell House

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1493 The Nuremberg Chronicle integrates text and pictures in an ambitious history of the world

1493 Pope Alexander VI draws a line through the Atlantic, dividing new discoveries between Spain (west) and Portugal (east)

1493 On Topa's death his son Huayna Capac succeeds to the throne as Inca emperor

1493 Columbus returns to Spain, landing at Palos with news of his great discoveries

1493 John I Albert summons the first recorded sejm, a parliament representing the whole of Poland

1492 Columbus and his fellow explorers make landfall on the largest of the Caribbean islands, Cuba

1492 After sailing for five weeks from the Canaries, Columbus and the Pinzón brothers step ashore in the Bahamas

1492 Christopher Columbus, together with the brothers Martin and Vicente Pinzón, sails west from Palos in Spain

1492 The world's first globe is published by Martin Behaim without showing America, in the very year of Columbus' voyage

1492 Rodrigo Borgia, elected pope as Alexander VI, already has four illegitimate children and possibly sires three more while pope

1492 Bayazid II, the Turkish sultan, makes a special point of welcoming in Istanbul the Jews expelled from Spain

1492 Torquemada persuades Ferdinand and Isabella to expel from Spain all Jews (about 160,000) who will not convert to Christianity

1492 A French privateer off the west coast of Ghana is the first to plunder a Portuguese vessel carrying home African gold

1491 The king of France is among those supporting Perkin Warbeck, supposedly a prince from the Tower, in his attempt on the English throne

1491 Savonarola, the new prior of San Marco, is a stern critic of both the pope in Rome and the Medici in Florence

1490 On the death of Matthias Corvinus, in 1490, the Habsburgs recover Vienna from the Hungarians

1489 Venice's annexation of Cyprus completes a useful chain of islands stretching to the

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eastern Mediterranean

1489 Leonardo da Vinci begins an unprecedented series of detailed anatomical drawings, based on corpses dissected in Rome

1488 On the death of his father, James III, James IV becomes king of Scotland

1488 Bartolomeu Dias, sailing for the king of Portugal, becomes the first European navigator to round the Cape of Good Hope

1487 When Henry VII is in Richmond for Christmas, fire breaks out in his lodging and destroys much of the palace

1487 Boiardo publishes a romantic epic, Orlando Innamorato, about Roland's love for a bewitching princess

1487 The Inca empire is extended to the north and a second capital is established at Quito

1487 The Fuggers make their first to a Habsburg archduke, beginning a profitable link with the dynasty

1487 Lambert Simnel, supposedly a nephew of Edward IV, is crowned in Dublin - but ends up working in the royal kitchens of Henry VII

1487 When the enlarged pyramid at Tenochtitlan is dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec sacrifice of human victims lasts for four days

1486 Henry VII, whose mother is Lancastrian, marries the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth and thus unites the roses - in the Tudor rose

1485 Henry Tudor kills Richard III at Bosworth Field and takes the crown as Henry VII

1485 A tower is added to St Mary's in Barnes

1485 Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, captures Vienna and makes the city his capital

1483 The Portuguese establish a further presence on the west coast of Africa, at the mouth of the Congo river

1483 Richard III has himself proclaimed king by a parliament held at Westminster, and begins a short reign of only two years

1483 The two royal princes, Edward V and his younger brother, are confined in the Tower of London by their uncle - soon to be Richard III

1483 The English king Edward IV dies and his succeeded by his 12-year-old son as Edward V

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1481 Civil war between squabbling Swiss cantons is averted by the diplomcy of a hermit, Brother Klaus, at the Convention of Stans

1480 Tomas de Torquemada, from a family of converted Jews, is appointed Spain's first Grand Inquisitor

1480 Ivan III, grand prince of Russia, becomes the first to deny the Mongols of the Golden Horde their annual tribute of tax

1480 Botticelli paints the Birth of Venus and Spring for the villa of a Medici cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent

1480 An increase in trade through the central Sahara benefits the Songhay, with their capital at Gao, at the expense of Mali

1480 The Maravi Confederacy is formed by Bantu tribes and soon wins control over a large region between Lake Nyasa and the Zambezi

1480 The name of Constantinople changes to Istanbul, a word based on the everyday Greek name for the city

1480 Leonardo da Vinci takes a professional interest in the new science of fortification

1478 Ivan III subdues proudly independent Novgorod, removing the city's famous bell

1478 A plot by the Pazzi family, with papal connivance, results in the murder of Guiliano de' Medici during high mass in Florence's cathedral

1477 Maximilian, heir to Austria, weds Mary, heiress to Burgundy, in the first of the great marriage alliances which form the Habsburg empire

1477 Ptolemy's concept of the world, with the Atlantic stretching to China and India, is printed in Bologna – fifteen years before Columbus sails west

1476 Caxton establishes the first English printing press in London, after working in the new trade in Bruges

1476 The Swiss win a decisive victory at Morat over the army of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy

1475 Giovanni Bellini becomes the key figure in the development of the Renaissance style in Venice

1475 Edward IV, landing at Calais with a large army, is bought off at Picquigny with a bribe - ending his attempt to revive the Hundred Years' War

1475 With Constantinople in Turkish hands, Moscow begins to see itself as the centre of

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Orthodox Christianity - or the third Rome

1475 Tommaso Portinari, the Medici agent in Bruges, commissions an altarpiece from Hugo van der Goes for his family church in Florence

1472 Leonardo da Vinci joins the painters' guild in Florence, probably after training with Verrocchio

1471 Topa succeeds his father, Pachacuti, as emperor of the Incas

1471 The new pope, Sixtus IV, secures his name in history, establishing the Sistine chapel and the Sistine choir

1470 Sandro Botticelli is established as one of the leading painters of Florence, working in particular for the Medici

1470 The first Italian printing press is set up in Venice, which soon rivals Germany for the quality of its printing

1469 The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella unites the crowns of Aragon and Castile, creating virtually a unified Spain

1469 The Orkneys and Shetlands come into the possession of James III of Scotland with the dowry of Margaret of Denmark

1469 Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur

1468 Jerome van Aken works almost exclusively in his native s' Hertogenbosch, from which he derives the name Hieronymus Bosch

1468 Skanderbeg dies and Albania becomes fully absorbed into the Ottoman empire

1467 Sir John Saye, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Edward IV, becomes the first recorded resident of Barn Elms, the manor house of Barnes

1466 The Portuguese settlers on the Cape Verde islands are granted a monopoly on the new slave trade

1466 In the treaty of Torun the Teutonic knights finally cede Prussia to Poland

1465 The Sicilian artist Antonello da Messina adopts the Flemish technique of painting in oils

1464 Mehmed II and the Ottoman Turks conquer Bosnia, where a large number of noble families convert to Islam

1464 After his death in 1464, Cosimo de' Medici acquires the posthumous title pater

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patriae – father of the fatherland

1463 The Chimu empire in Peru is conquered by the Incas under the leadership of Pachacuti's son Topa

1463 The assembly brought together in Bruges in 1463 is later seen as the first full gathering of the Netherlands States-General

1462 Portuguese settlers arrive to found Cidade Velha, on the Cape Verde island of Santiago

1462 In keeping with his personal interest in Plato, Cosimo de' Medici founds a Platonic Academy in Florence

1462 Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople, begins to build Topkapi Sarayi as his palace

1461 Henry VI flees to Scotland, abandoning the kingdom to the usurping Edward IV

1461 The first success in the Wars of the Roses goes to the white rose, with the Yorkist prince crowned as Edward IV

1461 Albrecht Pfister publishes the first book with printed illustrations - Der Ackermann aus Böhmen ('The farmer of Bohemia')

1461 Francois Villon, recently released from prison, writes his Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past

1460 Andrea Mantegna combines an interest in classical detail and recently discovered perspective

1460 On the death of his father, James II, James III becomes king of Scotland

1460 The Turks complete the occupation of Greece, which remains within the Ottoman empire until the nineteenth century

1460 Oil paints, long familiar in the Netherlands, begin to be adopted in Italy in place of tempera

1458 Matthias Corvinus begins a long reign which brings Moravia, Silesia and much of Austria within the Hungarian kingdom

1456 A Portuguese navigator discovers some of the Cape Verde islands, tropical and at that time uninhabited

1456 A copy of Europe's first book printed from movable type, the Gutenberg Bible, is completed in Mainz

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1456 The Turks, besieging Belgrade, are dispersed by a peasant army inspired by the preaching of a Franciscan friar, St John of Capistrano

1455 Master ES becomes the first artist to produce engravings

1455 An engagement at St Albans is the first battle in the 30-year struggle between the white and red roses of York and Lancaster

1453 Charles VII's full recovery of Aquitaine and Normandy effectively brings to an end the Hundred Years' War

1453 The French win a convincing victory at Castillon, recovering the last stronghold (except Calais) held by the English in France

1453 The Christian emperor Constantine XI dies in the fighting in Constantinople, as the Greek Byzantine empire yields to that of the Ottoman Turks

1453 Constantinople falls to a 21-year-old Muslim conqueror, Mehmed II, bringing the Ottoman Turks their capital city

1453 The Turks terrify Constantinople by lobbing vast stones at the city from a 19-ton bombard of cast iron

1452 Étienne Chevalier commissions from Jean Fouquet a series of illustrations for his Book of Hours

1450 Paolo Uccello is interested in the laws of perspective, in works such as The Battle of San Romano

1450 Francesco Sforza, a soldier of fortune, wins power in Milan

1450 Christian boys, trained as slaves in the personal service of the Turkish sultan, acquire considerable power as the elite corps of janissaries

1450 The most sacred of the Inca divinities, Punchao, is symbolized by a great golden disc representing the sun

1450 The French bring two small cannon on to the battlefield at Formigny, where they have a significant effect in achieving the French victory

1450 The caravel, a sailing ship developed in the Mediterranean and used down the west coast of Africa, is adapted by the Portuguese for Atlantic use

1450 The Swedish Riksdag includes peasants as a fourth estate, alongside clergy, nobles and burghers

1450 Coffee, derived from wild plants in Ethiopia, is cultivated in Arabia

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1450 A warrior king, Ewuare, establishes the forest kingdom of Benin

1450 The oldest surviving spring mechanism (enabling clocks to become small and portable) is put to work

1450 The massive architecture of the Incas, consisting of finely dressed irregular blocks of stone, becomes a feature of Cuzco

1450 Herat, under Timurid princes, succeeds Tabriz as the main centre of Persian art

1450 The matchlock, ignited from a smouldering length of rope, becomes the standard form of musket

1450 Piero della Francesca paints masterpieces in his small home town of San Sepolcro

1446 Portugal claims ownership of the region of Guinea, subsequently the centre of their slave trade on the west African coast

1445 A Muslim ruler is established in Malacca, forming the first of many Muslim dynasties in the Malay archipelago

1444 A Turkish army routs the Hungarians at Varna on the Black Sea, beginning a process which brings the Turks to the gates of Belgrade by 1456

1443 The Hungarian general Janos Hunyadi takes Sofia from the Turks and in the next few months liberates most of Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania

1443 The Dominican convent of San Marco, in Florence, is provided with a serenely beautiful series of frescoes by Fra Angelico and his assistants

1443 Skanderbeg, Albania's national hero, begins his long campaign of successes against the Turks

1442 Naples is captured by Alfonso V, breaking the link with France and uniting Sicily and Naples as an Aragonese kingdom

1440 Cuzco, city of the Incas, grows rapidly in power after Pachacuti ('transformer of the earth') becomes emperor

1439 Portuguese settlers are sent to the unoccupied islands of the Azores

1439 The Seventeenth Ecumenical Council moves from Ferrara, because of the danger of plague, and sets up in Florence

1439 Florence acquires first-hand experience of Greek culture when Greek Orthodox priests join in a debate on theology, in particular the question of Filioque

1438 The Byzantine emperor John Palaeologus and the Patriarch of Constantinope,

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Joasaph, arrive in Ferrara to attend a council of the Roman Catholic church

1438 After a decisive victory over the Chanca people, a young Inca prince seizes the throne in Peru and takes the name Pachacuti

1438 The French clergy pass a resolution at Bourges, limiting the power of the papacy within France, which is adopted by the king as a 'pragmatic sanction'

1438 The office of Holy Roman emperor becomes a hereditary title within the Habsburg dynasty

1437 On the death of his father, James I, James II becomes king of Scotland

1437 Charles VII enters Paris, marking conclusively the end of the French civil war

1436 Perspective fascinates Italian Renaissance painters after the publication of Alberti's treatise on the subject, De Pictura

1435 Rogier van der Weyden, the third in the extraordinary trio of Flemish artists of the 1430s, is appointed painter to the city of Brussels

1435 Chancellor Nicolas Rolin, of Burgundy, commissions an altarpiece from Jan van Eyck

1434 The rulers of Tenochtitlan join with two other neighbouring kingdoms to form the Aztec Triple Alliance

1434 Giovanni Arnolfini, a merchant from Lucca trading in Bruges, commissions from van Eyck a portrait of himself and his wife

1433 Cosimo de' Medici, arrested by a rival faction, escapes with his life thanks to bribes and well-placed friends

1433 The Compacts of Prague, agreed with the papacy in 1433, allow the Hussite laity to receive the sacrament in both kinds

1432 A new altarpiece is installed in the cathedral in Ghent, introducing the powerful realism of Jan van Eyck

1431 Joan of Arc, tried by the Inquisition on behalf of the English in Rouen, is burned at the stake as a relapsed heretic

1430 Robert Campin, also known as the Master of Flémalle, brings to Flemish painting a natural and everyday quality which is entirely new

1430 Work begins in Florence on Brunelleschi's Pazzi chapel, which encapsulates in miniature the new ideals of Renaissance architecture

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1430 Joan of Arc is captured in a skirmish with the Burgundians, who subsequently hand her over to the English

1429 Joan of Arc stands nearby while Charles VII is anointed at Reims, then kneels before him and for the first time calls him her king

1429 Joan of Arc leads French forces in the successful relief of Orléans

1429 Joan of Arc wins her way into the presence of Charles VII at Chinon and persuades him, eventually, to trust her

1428 A peasant girl, Joan of Arc, hears the voices of saints urging her to relieve the siege of Orléans

1427 A Portuguese captain, sailing for Henry the Navigator, chances upon the Azores

1425 Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch, makes voyages of trade and exploration with a fleet of Chinese junks

1425 The Temple of Heaven in Beijing is built for the third emperor of the Ming dynasty

1425 Packs of tarot playing cards are among the most popular products of Europe's first printing presses

1424 The Scots finally pay the ransom for the release of the Scottish prince, now James I, who travels north to claim his throne

1423 Masaccio paints some of the frescoes in the chapel of a Florentine silk merchant, Felice Brancacci, in Santa Maria del Carmine

1422 Henry VI, son of Henry V and Catherine of France, is king of England and theoretically king of France before his first birthday

1422 Jan Zizka wins a series of victories against papal armies, using the mobile barricade which becomes known as his 'war wagon fortress'

1422 The dauphin proclaims himself Charles VII of France, but with Paris in the hands of his enemies he is known as the king of Bourges

1421 The third Ming emperor moves the capital from Nanjing to Beijing and begins laying out the Forbidden City

1420 Henry V marries Catherine, daughter of the French king and sister of the rightful heir to the kingdom, the dauphin, who is on the opposing side

1420 The treaty of Troyes, between the English and the Burgundian faction, grants Henry V the status of heir to the French throne

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1420 The Portuguese, discovering the lush and uninhabited island of Madeira, send colonists to settle it

1420 Glazed windows become a feature of the richer homes of northern Europe

1419 John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, is murdered by the Armagnac faction in the presence of the dauphin - escalating France's civil war

1419 After a six-month siege Henry V makes a triumphal entry into Rouen, the city of his Norman ancestors

1418 A competition is launched for an architect to construct a dome above Florence's cathedral, and is won by Brunelleschi

1417 The Council of Constance, having done its best to dispose of the three existing popes, elects a new one - Martin V

1415 A Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, becomes fascinated by exploration down the coast of Africa and commissions successive voyages

1415 Sir William de Milbourne, the first known resident of Milbourne House, dies and is buried in the Barnes parish church of St Mary’s

1415 Henry V wins a victory on St Crispin's day at Agincourt, against a much larger and more heavily armed French force

1415 Henry V captures the French stronghold of Harfleur - where, in Shakespeare, he urges his dear friends 'once more unto the breach'

1415 John Huss, invited to Constance under a promise of safe conduct, is arrested, tried and burnt at the stake as a heretic

1415 Filippo Brunelleschi begins studying the ruins of classical Rome, with a view to rediscovering classical architecture

1414 A council is called at Constance, to consider the radical views of John Huss and to deal with the present excess of popes

1413 Soon after his accession Henry V begins construction of a new royal palace at Richmond

1413 Henry V succeeds his father, Henry IV, as king of England

1413 Henry IV dies in the Jerusalem chamber of Westminster Abbey, partly seeming to fulfil a prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem

1412 The three Limburg brothers illustrate for the duke of Berry the Très Riches Heures, one of the masterpieces of International Gothic

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1411 The linen drapers of Florence commission a statue of St Mark from Donatello, who carves for Orsanmichele the first free-standing Renaissance sculpture

1410 The Viking settlement in Greenland ends, after 400 years, when the last ship leaves the colony and sails for Norway

1410 The Poles defeat the Teutonic knights between Tannenberg and Grunwald, bringing the coastal strip around Gdansk into the Polish kingdom

1410 Shah Rukh, son of Timur, begins rebuilding the city of Herat

1409 Henry IV entertains at Eltham Palace the emperor Manuel II Palaeologos, the only Byzantine ruler ever to visit Britain

1409 The Council at Pisa elects a new pope, Alexander V, without persuading the other two to resign - bringing the total to an unprecedented three

1408 Henry Percy invades England from Scotland, and is killed at the battle of Bramham Moor

1408 With the end of the threat from Wales, the Prince of Wales becomes more directly involved in government, leading to frequent clashes with his ailing father

1408 Driven from Aberystwyth and Harlech, Owain Glyn Dwr loses support - and the last Welsh rebellion fades away

1407 Rivalry between factions of the French royal family results in the murder in Paris of the king's brother, Louis duke of Orléans, and the onset of civil war

1406 Henry IV has the Scottish prince educated, under guard, at Windsor Castle and demands a large ransom for his release (not paid until 1424)

1406 On the death of his father, Robert III, James I becomes king of Scotland

1406 Pisa is captured by Florence, to be followed a few years later by the purchase of the seaport of Livorno

1405 Henry IV suffers the first attack of some acute but unidentified illness that recurs frequently in the remaining eight years of his life

1405 Henry Percy leads a rebellion with Richard le Scrope, Archbishop of York, and flees to Scotland when it fails

1405 Timur is buried in a mausoleum (the Gur Amir) in Samarkand, a city which becomes an inspiration to his descendants

1404 Owain Glyn Dwr captures Aberystwyth and Harlech from the English and sets up an

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independent Welsh administration

1403 Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, conspires with Edmund Mortimer against Henry IV

1402 The 15-year-old Henry, prince of Wales and the future Henry V, takes personal command of the war against the Welsh

1402 John Huss, known for his radical approach to Christianity, is put in charge of the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague

1402 The Ottoman sultan Bayazid is defeated and captured near Ankara by Timur, who keeps the sultan in captivity until his death the following year

1400 Majolica, or tin-glazed earthenware, reaches Italy from Majorca and thus gets its name

1400 The Welsh rise against the English and proclaim Owain Glyn Dwr as their own prince of Wales

1400 The English mystery cycles are performed by trade guilds, on carts pulled from audience to audience around the city

1400 The followers of Wycliffe, after his death, become known as Lollards or 'mutterers'

1400 The final style of medieval painting, common to all Europe, is known as International Gothic because of its slender and elegant figures

1400 Richard II dies in Pontefract castle, almost certainly starved to death on the orders of the new king - insecure on his throne as an undeniable usurper

1400 Craftsmen and treasures arrive in large numbers in Samarkand, sent home from Timur's travels of conquest

1400 Guilds of singers and song-writers develop in German towns, calling themselves Meistersinger, or master singers

1399 Richard II cedes his crown to Bolingbroke, as Henry IV, and a few months later dies in Pontefract castle - probably starved to death

1399 Richard II is deposed by parliament and Boliingbroke is proclaimed king of England, as Henry IV, introducing the royal house of Lancaster

1399 Richard II surrenders at Conwy to the forces led by Henry of Bolingbroke

1399 Henry of Bolingbroke, denied his inheritance, returns to England to lead an armed rebellion against his cousin the king

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1399 John of Gaunt dies and Richard II denies Henry of Bolingbroke his Lancastrian inheritance, declaring Gaunt's vast estates forfeit to the crown

1398 Richard II banishes Thomas de Mowbray for life and Henry of Bolingbroke for ten years

1398 A dangerous feud develops between two of England's most powerful barons, Henry of Bolingbroke (son of John of Gaunt) and Thomas de Mowbray

1398 Timur devastates Delhi and loots treasure to take back to Samarkand on 120 elephants

1397 With the coronation of the 16-year-old Eric of Pomerania, the crowns of Denmark, Norway and Sweden are formally united for the first time

1397 The Golden Pavilion in Kyoto is built by the shogun Yoshimitsu as his own villa

1397 The keyboard of the organ is adapted in Germany to strings, thus providing the harpsichord - first mentioned in a manuscript of this year

1397 The English king, Richard II, commissions a diptych (the Wilton Diptych) showing himself being presented to the Virgin and Child

1395 Philip II of Burgundy commissions from Netherlands sculptor Claus Sluter a work, the Well of Moses, which launches the northern Renaissance

1394 Anne of Bohemia, the wife of Richard II, dies of plague at Richmond and in his distress the king orders the palace to be demolished

1393 The Ottoman sultan Bayazid I brings the Slav kingdom of Bulgaria under his control

1392 Yi Song-gye founds the Yi dynasty, which rules in Korea until the twentieth century

1392 Charles VI, king of France, suffers the first of many violent fits of madness

1391 Construction begins on a canal from Lübeck south to the Elbe, linking the Baltic and the North Sea

1390 Fan vaulting becomes part of the Gothic tradition, seen to perfection in the cloisters of Gloucester cathedral

1390 On the death of his father, Robert II, Robert III becomes king of Scotland

1389 After two years, in which the Lords Appellant have been in the ascendant, John of Gaunt helps Richard II gradually to recover his authority as king

1389 With a victory near Falköping, Margaret becomes regent of Sweden as well as Denmark and Norway

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1389 Victory at Kosovo gives the Ottoman Turks control over Serbia, which becomes a vassal state

1387 Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death

1387 Henry is one of the Lords Appellant, who are led by his uncle the Duke of Gloucester

1387 The Lords Appellant, a group of powerful barons, make political demands on Richard II and defeat the king's forces at Radcot Bridge, near Oxford

1386 Jogaila, baptized a Roman Catholic before marrying Jadwiga, brings Lithuania into the Christian fold - the last part of Europe to be converted

1386 Jadwiga, 12-year-old queen of Poland, marries Jogaila, her 34-year-old pagan neighbour - uniting the crowns of Poland and Lithuania

1386 A clock, designed only to strike the hours, is installed in Salisbury cathedral and is still working today

1386 John I, newly victorious in Portugal, proposes an alliance with England which has never been revoked

1385 Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy

1385 The victory at Aljubarrota, securing the Portuguese throne for John I, is commemorated in the Dominican abbey called Batalha

1384 Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the signore of Milan, sets about enlarging his territory - seizing Vicenza, Verona and Padua between 1384 and 1388

1383 Timur begins twenty years of almost continuous conquest with the capture and destruction of Herat

1381 Wat Tyler, leader of the Kentish rebels, meets Richard II at Smithfield - before being struck and wounded by the Lord Mayor of London

1381 A poll tax imposed in England provokes widespread unrest, which flares up in the Peasants' Revolt

1380 The Venetian blockade of Chioggia costs Genoa her fleet and ends Genoese rivalry with Venice in the eastern Mediterranean

1380 Dimitri, grand prince of Moscow, leads other Russian princes in a crushing victory over the Mongols on the Kulikovo plain

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1380 With the development of clocks, the hour becomes a fixed period of time - one twenty-fourth part of the day

1380 Koreans establish the first type foundry, casting movable type in bronze

1379 The French cardinals, objecting to the new Italian pope, elect their own man as Clement VII - and thus inaugurate the Great Schism of the papacy

1378 John Hawkwood, a condottiere in command of the White Company, is appointed captain general of Florence

1377 Jogaila inherits a pagan Lithuanian kingdom which has been extended as far south as Kiev

1377 The papal curia returns to Rome in what would seem a conclusive move if there were not, two years later, two popes - one of them elected back in Avignon

1377 10-year-old Richard II follows his grandfather, Edward III, on the English throne

1376 John Wycliffe, writing mainly in Oxford, is critical of the contemporary church and can find no basis for the pope's authority

1375 The courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur

1374 Kanami and Zeami Motokiyo please the shogun with their theatrical performance, and his patronage begins the tradition of Japan's No theatre

1371 On the death of his uncle, David II, Robert Stewart becomes king of Scotland as Robert II

1370 The Persian poet Hafiz perfects a form of short poem, the ghazal, dwelling on the pleasures of life with an undercurrent of Sufi mysticism

1369 The marriage of the duke of Burgundy to the heiress of Flanders lays the foundation for the great territorial expansion of Burgundy

1368 On the fall of the Yuan dynasty, replaced by the Ming, Tibet declares its independence from China

1368 Chu Yüan-chang drives the Mongols out of Beijing and declares a new dynasty - the Ming (meaning 'brilliant')

1367 Henry, son of John of Gaunt, is born in Bolingbroke castle and so becomes known as Henry of Bolingbroke

1367 One of four new yeomen of the chamber in Edward III's household is Geoffrey

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Chaucer

1367 A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman

1365 Portable guns are introduced not long after artillery, being mentioned in several European texts of the second half of the fourteenth century

1364 A great clock is completed in Padua, regulated mechanically by foliot and escapement

1362 Edward III gives his son, John of Gaunt, the title duke of Lancaster

1360 After four years of captivity in Bordeaux and London, the French king John II is released for a promised ransom of 3 million gold crowns

1359 John of Gaunt marries his cousin, Blanche of Lancaster, heiress to vast estates in the north of England

1358 Edward III begins to transform a royal manor by the Thames at Richmond into a building that can for the first time be called a palace

1356 Zhu Yuanzhang, a one-time Buddhist novice now leading a major rebellion against the Yuan dynasty, captures Nanjing and makes it his capital

1356 The battle of Poitiers ends, on the third day, with victory for the English and the capture of the French king, John II

1356 Charles IV establishes a permanent group of seven electors - four hereditary German rulers and the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier

1356 Chu Yüan-chang, leader of a peasant band, makes his headquarters in a town which he renames Nanking - 'southern capital'

1354 Gallipoli is taken by the Ottoman Turks, giving them their first foothold in Europe

1350 The classic Chinese underglaze blue is perfected in the imperial ceramic factory at Jingdezhen

1350 Boccaccio, visiting Petrarch in Florence, is inspired to devote himself to the pursuit of classical studies

1350 Humanism, or the study of classical literature as a living tradition, develops into one of the main strands of the Renaissance

1350 Armies of mercenaries, led by condottieri, conduct Italian warfare at an often extortionate rate

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1350 William Tell, a figure of legend, epitomizes the struggle of the Swiss farmers against their feudal overlords, the Habsburgs

1350 Water power is used in England for the heavy work of fulling cloth, in mills which can be seen as a first step towards the Industrial Revolution

1350 The Perpendicular style develops from the Decorated phase in English Gothic architecture

1349 Boccaccio begins his Decameron, supposedly the stories told by young Florentine men and women sheltering from the Black Death

1348 Massacres of Jews, rumoured to have caused the Black Death by poisoning wells, begin in southern France and spread through much of Europe

1348 The Black Death, making its way through Europe, is described in vivid detail by Boccaccio who sees its devastating effect in Florence

1347 Turkish tribes, besieging Genoese merchants in Caffa, lob the corpses of plague victims over the town walls and thus spread the Black Death

1347 Cola di Rienzo, appointed tribune of the people, enjoys a few months of dictatorial powers in Rome before the citizens tire of him

1347 The English siege of Calais ends when six burghers of the town, with ropes around their necks, offer their lives to save their fellow citizens

1347 Edward III establishes a new kind of knighthood with the Order of the Garter, conferred purely as an honour

1346 Udiana Deva, the last Hindu ruler of Kashmir, is murdered by his Muslim prime minister

1346 The more mobile English force, of longbows and infantry, defeats at Crécy the unwieldy crossbows and heavy cavalry of the French

1346 Charles IV, king of Bohemia, German king and Holy Roman emperor, makes Prague a glittering centre of learning and architecture

1346 The plague which later becomes known as the Black Death makes its first appearance in China

1345 Edward III of England, defaulting on his massive debts, drives the Florentine banking families of Bardi and Peruzzi into bankruptcy

1345 The great Byzantine altarpiece of St Mark's, the Pala d'Oro, is adjusted to take its present form

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1345 The Aztecs settle on an uninhabited island in a lake, which they name Tenochtitlan — the site of the modern Mexico City

1345 The bridge now known as Ponte Vecchio is constructed in Florence (replacing an older old bridge)

1342 The Vicars of St Mary's Church in Hampton are known back to 1342 and the old Church possibly existed from c.1250

1341 A laurel wreath is placed on the brow of Petrarch in Rome, in a renewal of interest in the classical world

1340 William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor

1340 John, a son of the English king Edward III is born in Ghent and so becomes known as John of Gaunt

1340 Edward III, in Ghent, publicly assumes the title and the arms of the king of France

1340 The Doge's Palace, begun in its present form in this year, is only one of the spectacular beauties of Venetian Gothic

1338 The first Dalai Lama dies in 1338 and is discovered to have been reincarnated in a boy born in 1340

1338 A new dynasty, the Ashikaga shogunate, comes into power after a member of the family, Takauji, wins a civil war

1337 Philip VI of France confiscates Guienne, a fief belonging to Edward III of England - whose response begins the Hundred Years' War

1336 A Hindu empire in southern India is established with its capital at Vijayanagara, meaning 'city of victory'

1333 The long reign of Casimir III, known as the Great, is a time of prosperity and achievement in Poland

1332 November 12 The earliest recorded incumbent of St Mary's Church in Twickenham, William Browne, is presented.

1330 European prosperity falters during the fourteenth century, with a run of bad harvests, a decline in trade and - from 1347 - the Black Death

1329 On the death of his father, Robert the Bruce, David II becomes king of Scotland

1329 A friar, who has failed to find Prester John in the east, publishes a book proving that the fabulous king lives in Ethiopia

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1328 A French cousin, Philip of Valois, is selected to succeed Charles IV - in preference to an English cousin, Edward III

1328 The English finally accept a treaty, in Edinburgh, declaring that Robert de Bruce is king of a Scotland 'free and divided from the kingdom of England'

1328 When Charles IV dies, for the first time in more than 400 years of the Capetian dynasty there is no son or brother to inherit the French crown

1327 Edward II, imprisoned by his wife and her lover, dies in Berkeley castle - almost certainly the victim of murder

1327 The fishery at ‘Kaiho-juxta-Braynford’, which may be the origin of Kew Pond, first appears in the accounts of St Swithin’s Priory at Winchester

1327 Isabella forces Edward II to renounce the English throne in favour of their 15-year- old son, Edward III

1327 Petrarch glimpses Laura in a church in Avignon and falls helplessly in love with her - or so he tells us

1327 The earliest surviving illustration of a cannon is drawn in this year (in a manuscript now in Oxford)

1326 Edward II is captured and imprisoned by his queen, Isabella, and her lover, Mortimer

1326 Moscow acquires new prestige when the metropolitan (or patriarch) of the Russian Orthodox church moves his residence from Vladimir

1325 Ibn Batutah leaves his home in Morocco to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and continues travelling for 24 years

1324 Mansa Musa, sultan of the gold-rich African state of Mali, is so lavish in Cairo (on his way to Mecca) that the value of Egyptian gold slumps

1323 A treaty divides Finland between two powerfully competitive neighbours, Sweden and Novgorod

1320 Wladyslaw I is crowned king of Poland in Cracow, which he makes his capital city

1320 The leading role of Schwyz in the victory at Morgarten causes the independent cantons to become informally known as the Swiss confederation

1320 Florence becomes a centre of international finance, with the Bardi and Peruzzi families acting as bankers to Europe's rulers

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1320 Philippe de Vitry, in his Ars Nova ('New Art'), lays out the basis of musical notation

1320 In places such as Siena and Orvieto, Italian architects add a blaze of colour to the more restrained northern pattern of Gothic

1316 Edward Bruce is crowned king of Ireland at Dundalk, but his uprising ends two years later when he is killed in battle with the English

1315 Islam replaces Christianity as the religion of the kings of Dongola, in present-day Sudan

1315 The Swiss, defeating the Habsburgs at Morgarten, make lethal use of their halberds - designed to jab, grapple and slash

1314 After years of guerilla warfare, Robert de Bruce defeats the English conclusively at Bannockburn - and becomes at last secure in his kingdom

1310 Fifty-four Knights Templars are burned at the stake, during the campaign of the French king to destroy the order

1309 The Knights of St John capture the island of Rhodes, which they rule as their own sovereign state for more than two centuries

1309 The hiatus on the Hungarian throne ends when the Angevin contender is crowned as Charles I

1309 Clement V moves the papacy to Avignon, in a move which is expected to be temporary but which lasts for nearly seventy years

1308 The Teutonic knights seize the coastal area round Gdansk, cutting off Poland's access to the sea

1308 The cathedral authorities in Siena commission from Duccio the great altarpiece which becomes known as the Maestà

1307 Dante, in exile from Florence, begins work on The Divine Comedy - completing it just before his death, 14 years later

1307 On the death of his father, Edward I, Edward II becomes king of England

1307 The English king Edward I dies campaigning near Carlisle, on an expedition north against his Scottish rival Robert the Bruce

1306 Robert de Bruce, in hiding on the island of Rathlin, is supposedly given a lesson in perseverance by a spider

1306 After the murder of his rival, in a church in Dumfries, Robert de Bruce is crowned king of Scots at Scone

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1305 Enrico degli Scrovegni employs Giotto to paint the cycle of frescoes in his chapel in Padua

1303 The Knights Templars withdraw from the island of Arwad, the last foothold of the crusaders in the Middle East

1302 Dante, a member of the White faction in Florence, is sentenced to death by the Blacks - and never returns to his native city

1302 The estates-general of France gather for the first time, in Notre Dame, to consider the king's relationship with the pope

1301 Andrew III of Hungary dies without an heir, bringing to an end four centuries of rule by the descendants of Arpad

1301 Edward I, conqueror of Wales, bestows the cherished title 'prince of Wales' on his own heir, the future Edward II

1300 Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce

1300 The bankers of northern Italy develop a method of accountancy - double-entry book-keeping - which will have lasting significance

1300 The Italian communes employ powerful leaders, or signori, in a trend which leads away from oligarchy and towards princely rule

1300 Tabriz under the Mongol Il-khans is the first centre of Persian miniature painting

1300 Portolan charts, showing the coastlines of the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Atlantic coast, are the start of accurate mapmaking

1300 Mosaic begins to yield to fresco, as the chief medium for the decoration of Christian churches

1300 Boniface VIII declares a Jubilee or Holy Year, with plenary indulgences for pilgrims who make their way to Rome

1300 The formalities of the Tea Ceremony demand equivalently exquisite wares from the Japanese potters

1300 The Early English phase in Gothic architecture gives way to the Decorated style

1300 Flying buttresses are a striking new structural feature on the exterior of Gothic cathedrals

1299 Southampton boasts the earliest known bowling green, mentioned in a document of

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this year

1298 Edward I's victory at Falkirk ends the career of William Wallace, of whom nothing more is heard until his capture and execution in 1305

1298 The English longbow, in one of its early appearances, proves too much for the Scots at Falkirk

1298 Marco Polo, in prison in Genoa, is persuaded by a fellow prisoner to narrate his adventures

1298 The authorities in Siena publish strict regulations for the design of the buildings around a new central piazza, the Campo

1297 William Wallace's victory over the English at Stirling Bridge enables him to rule Scotland on behalf of John de Balliol

1297 The English government in Dublin calls a parliament on the lines of England's recent Model Parliament

1296 Edward I invades Scotland, massacres the people of Berwick, captures John de Balliol and brings to Westminster the Stone of Scone

1295 Marco Polo is back in Venice after an absence of 25 years in the east

1295 The parliament summoned by Edward I in Westminster Hall is later seen as a 'model' for the breadth of its representation

1294 Kublai Khan dies and is succeeded, as second emperor of the Yuan dynasty, by his grandson Temür

1294 The first open-air democratic assembly, later characteristic of the Swiss cantons, is held in Schwyz

1291 The Swiss forest districts of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden sign an Everlasting League (in the Rütli meadow) to resist Habsburg domination

1291 In the space of a few months the Muslims take the last four crusader castles, Tyre, Sidon, Acre and finally Beirut

1290 The Jews in England are driven out of the country, soon to be followed by those in France

1290 The classical work of the Kabbalah, the Zohar, is almost certainly the work of the Spanish Kabbalist Moses de Leon

1290 The death of Margaret, child heiress to the Scottish throne, results in John de Balliol being chosen as king

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1289 Edward I of England arranges for his 5-year-old heir to marry Margaret the Maid of Norway, the 7-year-old heiress to the kingdom of Scotland

1285 Osman inherits the leadership of the tribal group later known by a version of his name, as the Ottoman Turks

1283 Edward I begins a series of powerful castles - Harlech, Caernarfon and Conwy in this year alone - to subdue the Welsh

1238 Work begins on the Alhambra, the palace fortress of the Muslim kings of Granada

1282 An uprising by Llewellyn ap Gruffydd, the prince of Wales, ends with his own death and the subjugation of Wales by the king of England, Edward I

1281 An incident in a church service sparks the uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers, in which 2000 French are killed overnight in Sicily

1281 For the second time Japan is saved from Mongol invasion by powerful storms - which are given the name kamikaze, or 'divine wind'

1279 The Tibetan link with the Mongols brings Tibet within the Chinese empire of Kublai Khan

1279 Beijing (known to the Mongols as Khanbaliq, 'city of the khan', and to the Chinese as Dadu, 'great capital') becomes for the first time the capital of China

1279 Resistance from the last adherents of the Song dynasty is finally brought to an end, giving Kublai Khan control of a united China

1279 With the fall of Hangzhou, the Song imperial capital, Kublai Khan's new Yüan dynasty is secure

1275 The Mamelukes control Palestine and Syria, bringing the region securely back into Muslim hands

1275 Marco Polo is presented to Kublai Khan in Xanadu, and according to his own account makes a very good impression

1275 Mongol control over the entire breadth of Asia introduces a stability often called the Pax Mongolica, echoing the Pax Romana

1274 Kublai Khan moves his administrative capital from Karakorum to what is now Beijing

1274 Dante, aged nine, is overwhelmed by the beauty of Beatrice - a child a year younger than himself who later becomes his poetic inspiration

1274 The Mongol invasion of Japan in 1274 seems to confirm the doom and disaster

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foretold by the Buddhist prophet Nichiren

1273 The period without a German king, known as the Great Interregnum, ends with the election of a Habsburg prince, Rudolf I

1272 Edward I is in Sicily when he becomes king of England, on the death of his father, Henry III

1271 The Mongol leader Kublai Khan chooses a name for his new dynasty in China, calling it Ta Yuan ('Great Origin')

1270 Novgorod asserts its independence, electing its own city magistrate to take over the role of the local Russian prince

1270 The Assassins are systematically destroyed by Baybars, the Mameluke sultan of Egypt

1269 The Marinids, a Berber tribe, take Marrakech and bring to an end Almohad rule in Morocco

1268 The first mention of a lens occurs in a manuscript by Roger Bacon, to be soon followed by the invention of spectacles

1267 In a treaty agreed at Shrewsbury, the English king Henry III acknowledges Llewellyn ap Gruffydd as the prince of Wales

1266 Thomas Aquinas begins the outstanding work of medieval scholasticism, his Summa Theologiae

1295 The new Mameluke dynasty in Egypt begins a systematic campaign to drive the Crusaders out of the Middle East

1265 Prince Edward, escaping from captivity, defeats and kills Simon de Montfort at Evesham

1265 Hulagu and his Mongol descendants rule Persia as Il-khans, subordinate to the great khan in the east

1264 Simon de Montfort, leading the barons in rebellion, captures Henry III and his son Edward at Lewes

1264 Kublai defeats his brother Ariq Böge and thus establishes his position as Great Khan of the Mongols

1263 A Scottish victory over the Norwegians at Largs results in the recovery of the western isles

1263 Pope Urban IV offers Sicily to a French prince, Charles of Anjou, who marches

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south in 1266 to fight for the kingdom

1262 The Norwegian king, Haakon IV, annexes Iceland as his personal fief, bringing to an end the commonwealth established in AD 930

1260 At Ayn Jalut, near Nazareth, the Egyptian Mamelukes defeat the Mongol army of Hulagu - the first military setback for the Mongols

1260 Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, is elected Great Khan of the Mongols

1260 The Bohemian prince Otakar II, ruler also of Austria, extends his territories after defeating the Hungarians at Kressenbrunn

1260 A new form of poetry is written in northern Italy, described later by Dante as a sweet new style - the dolce stil nuovo

1259 Nicola Pisano completes a pulpit for Pisa, borrowing details from Roman sarcophagi - an early example of a new interest in the classical past

1258 When Hulagu and his Mongol army reach Baghdad, in 1258, it is said that 800,000 of the inhabitants are killed - and the caliph is kicked to death

1258 Henry III accepts severe curtailment of his powers in the Provisions of Oxford, but then asks the pope to absolve him from his oath

1257 The Persian poet Sa'di publishes his Bustan ('Orchard'), a collection of moral tales in verse

1256 Pope Alexander IV establishes a third order of preaching friars, the Augustinians

1256 Hulagu and his horde of Mongols cross the Amu Darya river and move against Muslim Persia

1255 The pope, eager to fill the vacant throne of Sicily, offers it to a son of Henry III of England but gets no firm response

1254 The death of the last Hohenstaufen ruler, Conrad IV, leaves a vacancy on the German throne which is not filled for nineteen years

1253 Construction begins of two basilicas, one above the other on a hillside in Assisi, in memory of St Francis

1252 A huge bronze sculpture, known as Daibutsu and cast in Kamakura, depicts Amida, the Amitabha Buddha of Pure Land Buddhism

1252 Alexander Nevsky, appointed grand prince of Vladimir in 1252, thrives by collaborating with the Mongols of the Golden Horde

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1250 The last sultan of Saladin's dynasty is murdered by slaves in the palace guard, and Mameluke rule is reintroduced in Egypt

1250 France becomes the first kingdom to establish a permanent parliament when Louis IX reserves a chamber in his palace for quarterly sessions

1250 A school of translation is set up in Toledo, to translate classical Greek texts from the Arabic versions into Latin

1250 The Yoruba people of Ife create extraordinary sculptures in brass

1250 A Japanese potter, returning from China, makes Seto the centre of ceramic production in Japan

1250 The kingdom of displaces Mapungubwe as the dominant Shona power in this region of southern Africa

1250 The Palio, in which horses race round the Campo in Siena, is held from this time

1250 Europe grows in prosperity during the thirteenth century, with a widespread increase in trade and production

1250 Tannhäuser is one of the Minnesinger, the German equivalents of the French troubadours

1248 Birger Jarl establishes a dynasty which brings all Sweden under a single rule

1244 The siege of the Catharist stronghold of Montségur ends when 200 heretics are herded into a wooden stockade and are burnt

1243 Construction begins in Paris on the Sainte Chapelle, designed to house relics acquired by Louis IX, the king of France

1241 Mongols of the Golden Horde reach Hungary, where they graze their horses for the summer before withdrawing to the

1241 Mongols of the Golden Horde defeat the Poles at Legnica and ravage the city of Cracow

1240 Alexander, a Russian prince, defeats a Swedish army on the frozen river Neva, thus winning his name Alexander Nevksy

1240 Haakon IV is the first ruler to build up a strong Norway, some two centuries after the region becomes a single kingdom

1240 A warlord, Sundiata, conquers Ghana and establishes the kingdom of Mali

1237 Batu Khan and his Mongols sweep into Russia, where they and their descendants

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become known as the Golden Horde

1233 Gregory IX sends Dominican friars to root out the remains of the Catharist heresy in France, thus launching the Inquisition

1232 The kingdom of Granada is established with a Berber noble, Muhammad I, as the first king

1231 The Mongols conquer the Korean peninsula, subsequently using it as a base for two expeditions against Japan

1230 Ogadai, son of Genghis Khan, turns his father's headquarters at Karakorum into a capital city

1228 Frederick II, leader of the sixth crusade, briefly recovers Jerusalem for the Christians by negotiating with the Muslims

1225 Magna Carta is reissued slightly modified when Henry III comes of age; in the version which becomes enshrined in English law

1225 The Teutonic knights undertake a new form of crusade, attempting to subdue the pagan Prussians who occupy part of the Baltic coast

1223 The Franciscans are formally established by Honorius III as Ordo Fratrum Minorum, the Order of the Friars Minor

1222 Andrew II accepts the Golden Bull, a charter of liberties demanded by the nobles of Hungary

1220 Llewellyn ap Iorwerth acquires such authority over other Welsh chieftains that he is informally referred to as the prince of Wales

1220 Frederick II is crowned Holy Roman emperor by a somewhat reluctant pope, Honorius III

1220 Nearly 200 windows make Chartres cathedral the most magnificent display of early stained glass

1220 Within a span of less than ten years, from 1215, Genghis Khan and the Mongols plunder from China to eastern Europe

1219 St Francis of Assisi joins a crusading army in Egypt and attempts to convert the sultan Melek-el-Kamel and his followers to Christianity

1216 On the death of his father, King John, Henry III becomes king of England

1216 The Dominicans are formally established by Pope Honorius III as Ordo Fratrum Praedicatorum, the Order of the Friars Preachers

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1215 In Magna Carta's lesser clauses (39 and 40) there are enshrined certain basic guarantees concerning the rule of law

1215 St Mary's chapel in Barnes is enlarged

1215 John, the king of England, fixes his seal to Magna Carta, which the barons place before him in a meadow called Runnymede

1215 St Dominic and his companions tell Innocent III of their wish to teach and preach in the bustle of the towns

1212 Participants in the Children's Crusade suffer disaster after the waters of the Mediterranean fail to part for them

1211 The leader of a Turkish army establishes an independent sultanate in Delhi, beginning many centuries of Muslim rule in north India

1210 St Francis and eleven companions tell Innocent III of their wish for a life of holy poverty in the bustle of the towns

1208 The murder of the pope's legate to Toulouse provokes the Albigensian crusade, which aims to wipe out the Catharist heresy

1206 Temujin, elected chief of all the Mongol tribes, takes the name Genghis Khan

1205 Many of the treasures adorning the church of San Marco in Venice are loot taken from Constantinople during the fourth crusade

1205 The story of Parsifal and the Holy Grail becomes the subject of a courtly epic by Wolfram von Eschenbach

1204 A Latin empire is set up in Constantinople on the same basis as the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem

1204 Venice takes the useful islands of Corfu and Crete as part of the spoils of the fourth crusade

1204 The Byzantine empire continues, in much reduced form, with a new capital at Nicaea

1204 The crusaders of the fourth crusade besiege, take and destroy the Christian city of Constantinople

1204 The French king, Philip II, takes Normandy from the English, and follows this success by taking Anjou a year later

1202 A German order, the Knights of the Sword, begins the forcible conversion of Latvia

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and Estonia to Christianity

1202 The fleet of the fourth crusade departs from Venice - only to be diverted from its purposes by Venetian guile

1200 The heresy of the Cathars (meaning 'pure' ones) is now so well established in southern France that they have bishops of their own

1200 The Chinese develop a feature of great significance in the history of seafaring - a sternpost rudder which is an integral part of the ship

1200 German pressure eastwards (the Drang nach Osten) steadily brings colonists into regions previously occupied by Slavs

1200 Bushido, the code of the samurai, emphasizes the necessary qualities of respect, decorum, courage and martial skill

1200 Flemish towns begin to acquire municipal independence, as communes, following the earlier Italian trend

1200 In the cathedral on Torcello, and in St Mark's, Venetian mosaics are a culmination in the west of the Byzantine tradition

1200 The samurai provide military support for the shogun, in a system similar to feudalism at this same period in Europe

1200 A small rectangular flint chapel is built on the site of the present St Mary's church in Barnes

1200 Terracotta heads and figures are buried in graves in the region of Djenné in modern Mali

1200 The longbow, a weapon of great use to English armies, is probably first developed in Wales

1200 The new Christian doctrine of Transubstantiation prompts rumours that the Jews desecrate the consecrated Host

1199 On the death of his brother, Richard I, John becomes king of England

1197 The three-year old Frederick II has a claim to the thrones of both Sicily and Germany on the death of his father, the emperor Henry VI

1193 A documentary reference to Kingston Bridge is first recorded in 1193; it has stone revetments but a flimsy wooden structure in constant need of repair

1192 Richard I, returning from the Holy Land in disguise, is recognized in an inn near Vienna and is imprisoned until England pays a massive ransom

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1192 Yoritomo is given the title sei-i-tai-shogun, beginning centuries of rule by shoguns more powerful than the Japanese emperors

1191 The Teutonic Knights are founded to run a hospital in Acre, in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem

1191 The Muslim garrison of Acre surrenders to Richard I, who orders the massacre of 2700 of its members

1190 The third crusade suffers an early disaster when its first leader, the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, is drowned crossing the Calycadnus river

1190 A year after succeeding to the throne of England, Richard I sets off east as one of the leaders of the third crusade

1189 The English king Henry II is succeeded by his third son as Richard I

1188 Representatives of the towns in Léon are summoned to one of the earliest known parliaments

1187 Saladin takes Jerusalem and treats the Christian inhabitants with a consideration unusual for the time

1187 Saladin captures various Crusader fortresses and walled cities, including Acre

1187 Saladin destroys the Christian army of the Latin kingdom in a battle below the Horns of Hattin

1185 The triumph of the Minamoto clan in Japan in 1185 leads to an uneasy relationship between the brothers Yoritomo and Yoshitsune

1182 Resentment of western merchants results in a massacre of Roman Catholics by fellow Christians in Constantinople

1180 In Cairo the Jewish philosoper Moses Maimonides writes, in Arabic, a much translated text with the endearing title Guide to the Perplexed

1180 In Cordoba the Muslim philosopher Averroës writes commentaries on Aristotle that are influential throughout medieval Europe

1180 The shared memories and legends of Nordic peoples are brought together in a great German epic, the Nibelungenlied

1179 In a treaty signed at Cazorla, the kings of Castile and Aragon agree on a plan of cooperation against the Muslims

1176 The first known eisteddfod is held during Christmas festivities at Rhys ap Gruffydd's

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court in Cardigan castle

1176 Construction begins on London Bridge, the first stone bridge to be built across a tidal waterway

1175 The Gothic style is first seen in Britain in the new east end of Canterbury cathedral

1174 The Scottish king, William the Lion, is captured raiding into Northumberland and is taken south with his feet tied beneath his horse

1171 Henry II, the king of England, summons the Irish and Norman lords to do homage to him in Dublin

1171 The English king, Henry II, acknowledges Rhys ap Gruffydd as the lord of south Wales

1171 Saladin deposes the Fatimid caliph and brings Egypt back to orthodoxy, acknowledging the rule of the Sunni caliph in Baghdad

1170 Four knights, acting on an unguarded hint from Henry II, murder Thomas Becket on December 29 in his cathedral at Canterbury

1170 After an apparent reconciliation with Henry II, Thomas Becket leaves France and returns to Canterbury

1170 Thomas Becket, in France, suspends the English bishops who have participated in the coronation of the 'Young King'

1170 Henry II arranges for the archbishop of York to crown his son, the 'Young King', as a joint ruler

1170 The first known mystery play, the Mystery of Adam, takes place outside a church somewhere in France

1170 The English exchequer grows in importance under Henry II, taking its name from the table on which financial calculations are made

1169 Normans land in Ireland, seize Wexford, and in the following year capture Waterford and Dublin

1164 Thomas Becket, having offended the king by his firm stand as archbishop of Canterbury, flees to a monastery near Paris

1162 Thomas Becket, Lord Chancellor to Henry II, is forced by the king to accept the vacant post of archbishop of Canterbury

1160 Chrétien de Troyes and other French authors turn the stories of Arthur and his knights into a romance of courtly love

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1159 Henry the Lion builds a new town at Lübeck, well placed to develop as the centre of the Hanseatic League

1157 A Russian prince, Andrei Bogolyubski, makes his capital east of Moscow at Vladimir, where he builds a cathedral and several churches

1156 Vienna is adopted by the Babenberg rulers as the capital city of Austria

1154 Henry II, coming to the throne of England, is king or feudal overlord of an unbroken swathe of territory from the Tweed to the Pyrenees

1154 The inhabitants of Damascus surrender their city to Nur ed-Din, helping him greatly in his campaign against the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem

1152 Frederick Barbarossa becomes king of Germany and Holy Roman emperor, greatly extending the power of the empire during a long reign

1150 The merging of Catalonia with Aragon, by marriage, creates a power in northern Spain of comparable strength to Castile

1150 German merchants begin trading along the coasts of Latvia and Estonia, a region to which they give the name Livonia

1150 Zen Buddhism reaches Japan from China and appeals greatly to the new samurai class

1150 The biblical kings and queens in the west porch of Chartres cathedral are a striking early example of Gothic sculpture

1150 After centuries of raiding the northern part of Sri Lanka, the Tamils establish a settled Hindu presence in the island

1150 The Medici move into Florence from their country home in the Mugello valley

1150 The Aztecs begin to move south from their original home, which they call Aztlan, somewhere in northern Mexico

1150 The city of Angkor and the great temple of Angkor Wat are created by the Khmer dynasty in Cambodia

1150 In feudal France and Germany Charlemagne is by now venerated as a saint

1148 Louis VII and Conrad III do grave harm to the Latin Kingdom by a feeble attack that merely alienates the previously friendly city of Damascus

1148 By the time Louis VII and Conrad III reach the Holy Land they have lost more than half their joint armies to Muslim attacks

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1147 Seville falls to the Almohads, from north Africa, who make it their Spanish capital

1147 The second crusade is led east by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany

1147 Gilbert of Hastings, an English priest, becomes bishop of the recovered see of Lisbon - the first of many such links between England and Portugal

1147 Alfonso I takes Lisbon from the Muslims, with the unexpected help of some passing English crusaders

1147 Rival Berber tribesmen, the Almohads, evict the Almoravids from Marrakech and soon conquer the whole north African coast

1145 A bishop in the crusader territories of the Middle East has news of a fabulously wealthy Christian king, Prester John

1145 A new form of pious devotion is seen in Chartres, with people painfully dragging wagons of stone to enlarge the cathedral

1144 The fall of Edessa prompts the pope, Eugenius III, to call for a second crusade to defend the Latin kingdom

1144 The city of Edessa is captured by Zangi, a Mameluke general, in the first setback for the crusaders in the Middle East

1144 The new abbey church of St Denis is consecrated near Paris, introducing the style of architecture later known as Gothic

1142 The great castle of Krak des Chevaliers is built in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem by the Knights of St John

1139 Victory over the Muslims at Ourique is seen as the moment of Portugal's independence from the kingdom of Leon

1139 Pope Innocent III and the second Lateran council outlaw the crossbow as a weapon causing unacceptable devastation

1138 Conrad III, of the Hohenstaufen family, is elected German king - a title which remains in the family for more than a century, bringing with it that of Holy Roman emperor

1136 Walter FitzAlan takes a post as steward with the Scottish king, thus establishing the Stewart family and later dynasty

1135 On the death of Henry I, his nephew Stephen moves quickly to keep Henry's daughter Matilda off the English throne

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1132 Work begins on the exquisite palace chapel in Palermo, built for the Norman kings of Sicily

1130 The full flowering of the Romanesque style is seen in the nave of the abbey church at Vézelay, in France

1130 A popular French poem, the Chanson de Roland, turns a minor disaster in one of Charlemagne's campaigns into a tale of epic heroism

1120 The Knights Templar are founded, to protect pilgrims from the Muslims on the journey to Jerusalem

1120 The White Ship strikes a rock off the Cherbourg peninsula drowning William the Aetheling, heir to the English throne

1120 The troubadours of Provence develop a new form of love poetry in French, introducing courtly love

1115 St Bernard establishes a new monastery at Clairvaux, from which he presides over the rapid expansion of the Cistercian order

1115 Peter Abelard teaches philosophy at Notre Dame until an affair with one of his pupils, Héloïse, brings his career to a dramatic end

1114 A 'chapelry' exists by now in Petersham, probably occupying the same site as a Saxon church mentioned in the Domesday Book

1113 The Knights of St John of Jerusalem become an established order under papal protection

1109 The crusaders now rule the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch and the counties of Tripoli and Edessa

1102 The chansons de geste, performed by professional minstrels in castles and manors, celebrate the exploits of Charlemagne and his paladins

1100 Conjoined twins Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst are born in Biddenden, in Kent

1100 On the death of his brother, William II, Henry I becomes king of England

1100 Chinese potters in the Song dynasty develop the wares known as celadons, with thick transparent green glazes

1100 Greek texts, translated by Arabic scholars in Baghdad, gradually make their way through the Muslim world to Christian Europe

1100 Many of the towns of northern Italy acquire virtual independence as self-governing

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communes

1100 The Assassins, a sect of Nizari Ismailis, begin to acquire strongholds in Persia

1099 Crusaders capture the holy city of Jerusalem and massacre the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants

1099 Konya, in central Turkey, becomes the capital of the Seljuk Turks, who call themselves sultans of Rum

1098 After a siege of seven months, the city of Antioch falls to the knights of the first crusade

1098 Benedictine monks, wishing to return to the early ideals of the order, form a community at Cîteaux which becomes the Cistercian order

1096 The German crusade begins with a massacre of Jews in many of the region's cities

1096 Peter the Hermit, an old monk on a donkey, leads the largest of the popular groups from Germany on the first crusade

1095 Pope Urban II preaches the first crusade, urging the Christians of Europe to march east to recover Jerusalem from the Muslims

1094 Rodrigo Diaz, known as El Cid, drives out the Muslims and wins Valencia

1093 Work begins on a new cathedral in Durham, which will become an outstanding example of Norman (or Romanesque) architecture

1091 Roger I, the first Norman count of Sicily, completes the conquest of the island from the Muslims

1087 On the death of his father, William the Conqueror, William II becomes king of England

1085 Toledo is captured from the Muslims by Alfonso VI of Castile, who continues the city's traditions of religious tolerance

1084 St Bruno and six companions retire to Chartreuse, in the French Alps, and establish the Carthusian order

1082 Venice acquires valuable trading privileges from Constantinople, her merchants being excused all dues and customs in the Byzantine empire

1080 Norman earls are given territories on the marshes of Wales, with the specific task of raiding their neighbours

1080 Work begins on the story of the Norman conquest, narrated in embroidery in the

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Bayeux tapestry

1080 Omar Khayyám, mathematician and astronomer, writes four-line verses, or quatrains, in his spare time

1078 Anselm includes in his Proslogion his famous 'ontological proof' of the existence of God

1075 Pope Gregory VII decrees that only the church may make ecclesiastical appointments, thus initiating the investiture controversy between pope and emperor

1071 The Seljuk Turks and the Byzantines meet in battle at Manzikert, with victory going to the Turks

1071 The campaigns of Alp Arslan, culminating in 1071, give the Seljuk Turks a lasting presence in Anatolia

1066 William the Conqueror (William I) is crowned on Christmas Day at Westminster - giving the new abbey church two coronations and a royal funeral in its first year

1066 Harold, hurrying south to confront the Normans after his victory at Stamford Bridge, is defeated and killed at Hastings

1066 The Normans, as seen in the Bayeux tapestry, invade England in Viking longships with fortified platforms for archers

1066 Harold defeats at Stamford Bridge the joint army of his brother Tostig and of the Norwegian king, Harald Hardraade

1066 Halley's comet, appearing in the Normans' annus mirabilis, is later depicted in the Bayeux tapestry

1066 On the day of Edward's burial, Harold is crowned king - almost certainly in the same abbey church at Westminster

1066 Edward the Confessor is buried in his new abbey church at Westminster, consecrated only the previous week

1066 On his death bed in Westminster, Edward the Confessor designates Harold - foremost among England's barons - as his successor

1064 Su Sung, a Buddhist monk, develops in China the principle of the escapement in his tower clock worked by a water wheel

1062 Berber tribesmen, the Almoravids, establish a base at Marrakech from which they conquer northwest Africa and move into Spain

1057 Duncan's son, Malcolm, kills Macbeth in battle at Lumphanan - and in the following

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year is himself crowned at Scone

1055 Togrul Beg enters Baghdad and is granted by the caliph the title of sultan, which ecomes hereditary in his Seljuk dynasty

1054 A papal delegate (from Leo IX) excommunicates Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the delegate is excommunicated in retaliation, launching a lasting East-West Schism

1054 Astronomers in China and Japan observe the explosion of the supernova which is still visible as the Crab Nebula

1054 A Russian chronicle makes the first mention of the marauding Polovtsy, who persistently raid Russian cities from the steppes

1050 Ife emerges as a powerful kingdom in the equatorial forest of the lower Niger

1050 Polyphony brings new complexity of interweaving vocal lines, in the choral singing of abbey or cathedral

1050 The rulers of Baghdad harness homing pigeons as postmen.

1050 The concept of movable type for printing is pioneered in China, using fired clay, but it proves impractical

1050 A Muslim dynasty is established at Kilwa, on the east African coast

1050 The heavier and more dense style of calligraphy, known as 'black letter', becomes the fashion in manuscripts written in northern Europe

1050 Islam reaches Kanem-Bornu, a joint kingdom encompassing the eastern and western shores of Lake Chad

1042 Edward the Confessor, the rightful heir in the Anglo-Saxon royal line, becomes king of England

1040 The Seljuk Turks win a victory at Dandanqan, which gives them a base in the north of Iran and Afghanistan

1040 In a battle near Elgin Macbeth kills his cousin Duncan, a rival claimant to the Scottish throne

1040 A Chinese manual on warfare includes the earliest known description of gunpowder

1030 Yaroslav commissions Russkaya Pravda ('Russian truth'), a code of Russia's laws

1030 Yaroslav builds up his Russian kingdom and turns his capital, Kiev, into a spectacular Christian city

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1025 Mahmud of Ghazni marches an army across an Indian desert to destroy a great temple at Somnath, killing - it is said - some 50,000 Hindus

1024 Conrad II is elected as the German king, begining the dynasty variously known as Franconian or Salian

1020 Count Radbot builds himself a 'hawk's castle' or Habichstburg, near Zurich, from which the Habsburg dynasty takes its name

1020 The Persian scholar Avicenna, author of encyclopedic works on philosophy and medicine, spends the last part of his life in Isfahan

1017 Canute, joint king of Denmark, is accepted also as king of England after subduing the country and marrying Ethelred's widow

1014 Brian Boru, aged 73, achieves a major victory over the Vikings at Clontarf but is killed in his tent after the battle

1010 Firdausi completes his great chronicle of Persian history, the Shah-nama, which becomes established as Iran's national epic

1010 Thorfinn Karlsefni leads an expedition to north America, traces of which may survive in a longhouse at L'Anse aux Meadows

1001 Pope Sylvester II, according to tradition, sends a sacred crown for the coronation of Hungary's first king, St Stephen

1001 Japanese author Murasaki Shibubi produces, in The Tale of Genji, a book which can be considered the world's first novel

1000 The feudal knight of northern Europe, wearing armour of chain mail on a sturdy horse, becomes the fighting machine of the Middle Ages

1000 Lively and often fantastic figures, cunningly fitted around the capitals of columns, show the vigour of Romanesque sculpture

1000 A trading centre at Mapungubwe, on the Limpopo, evolves into a state ruled by a king in a zimbabwe

1000 Warlike tribal groups, calling themselves Rajput and claiming descent from the Aryan warrior caste, are now in Rajasthan

1000 Turks from Ghazni, raiding into northwest India, renew the pressure of Islam on the subcontinent

1000 The Inca ethnic group migrates into the region of the Cuzco valley in Peru

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1000 Man-eating Caribs move into the islands around the sea named after them - the Caribbean

1000 The salt mines of the Sahara provide a staple commodity in the African caravan trade

1000 Leif Ericsson claims to have made landfall at three places in north America, one of which he names Vinland - the land of wine

1000?The huge stone heads standing on Easter Island are carved and erected at some time between the sixth and seventeenth century AD

1000 The first illustrated manual of surgery is written by Abul Kasim, an Arab physician in Cordoba

1000 The Jews, barred from any work which Christians want to do, find profitable employment as money-lenders

1000 Buddhist, Hindu and Jain shrines are carved from the rock in the cave temples of Ellora, in India

1000 A Muslim dynasty is established at Gao, on the Niger

1000 Iceland's parliament, the althing, passes a resolution that everyone on the island is to be baptized

999 Mahmud, a Turk, builds an empire based on Ghazni (in modern Afghanistan)

995 Sei Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting to the Japanese empress, records her thoughts and impressions in her Pillow Book

991 New waves of Danes, raiding into the English territory of Danelaw, are bought off by Ethelred with Danegeld

987 Vladimir, the prince of Kiev, decides that Greek Orthodoxy is the most suitable religion for the Russian people

987 Hugh Capet is the first in an unbroken line of twelve generations on the throne of France

987 Hugh Capet, a Frankish noble elected king of west Francia, establishes the royal dynasty of France.

987 The Mayan city of Chichén Itzá is captured by the Toltecs

986 The Khitan, a tribe from eastern Mongolia, fortify Beijing and make it their capital city

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981 Eric Thorvaldsson, or Eric the Red, sails to Greenland when he is exiled from Iceland

976 Leopold, of the Babenberg family, becomes margrave of Austria and founds a dynasty which lasts for three centuries

976 Brian Boru becomes king of Munster and leader of the Irish campaign against the Vikings

975 The Hungarian king Gezá and his family are baptized as Roman Catholics, beginning a long link between Hungary and Rome

969 The Fatimids establish a new capital city on the Nile, calling it Al Kahira ('the victorious'), which becomes reduced to Cairo

965 Mieszko, pagan chieftain of the Poles, marries a Christian Czech princess and brings all his people into the Roman Catholic fold

963 The Poles are first recorded as a tribal group when a German knight comes into contact with them in the region round Gniezno

962 The imperial coronation of Otto I by Pope John XII in St Peter's puts in place the formal role of a Holy Roman emperor

960 Harald Bluetooth is baptized a Christian and unites the whole of Denmark as a single kingdom.

960 A warlord, Zhao Kuangyin, establishes a new Chinese dynasty - the Song

960 A fair-skinned and bearded king, by the name of Quetzalcoatl, is exiled from Tula but says that he will be back in a 'One Reed' year.

950 The Byzantine empire enjoys a revival, bringing the Slavs within the Greek Orthodox fold and winning victories against the Muslims

950 The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy

950 So many Slavs are captured and sold, in the movement eastwards of the Germans, that their name becomes the European word for a slave

950 Medieval Europe's first institute of higher education is established, with the founding of the medical school at Salerno

950 Leon forms a loose alliance with its southern neighbour, Castile, to become the most powerful unit in northern Spain

950 Toltecs move into the valley of Mexico from the north and establish a capital city at

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Tula

950 A Chinese engineer, Chiao Wei-yo, is credited with devising the principle of the two- level pound lock for canals

935 Wank Kon changes the name of his kingdom to Koryo, meaning 'high and beautiful', thus providing the rest of the world with the name Korea

930 Saadiah Gaon writes a seminal work of Jewish philosophy in his Book of Beliefs and Opinions

930 An althing of chieftains establishes the commonwealth of Iceland, which will survive for more than three centuries

929 Wenceslas, a prince of the Premsylid family, is murdered on his way into church - and becomes Bohemia's patron saint

921 The Jewish calendar, deriving originally from the example of Babylon, is given its lasting form

920 After years of raiding up the Shannon, the Vikings capture Limerick

919 Henry I is elected king of the east Frankish kingdom, consisting of four great feudal duchies - Bavaria, Swabia, Saxony and Franconia

911 The Vikings settle in France, as Normans, when Rollo the Ganger is granted feudal rights over the region round Rouen

910 Paper money is developed in China, becoming later one of the aspects of Chinese life which most impresses Marco Polo

909 Monastic reform, begun at Cluny, is so successful that more than 1000 Benedictine houses eventually follow the Cluniac example

903 The leader of a peasant uprising captures and kills the Chinese emperor, bringing to an end the T'ang dynasty

900 Playing cards are in use in T'ang dynasty China.

900 The Samanids, replacing the Saffarids, transform their capital at Bukhara into a centre of Persian culture

900 Zoroastrians migrate from Muslim Persia to India, where they become known as Parsees

900 Chan Chan, today the largest of the ruined Andean cities, dominates the entire length of Peru

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900 A Tamil kingdom, established by the Cholas, controls the whole of south India and will last for two centuries

900 With the end of inconoclasm, the screen between the nave and the altar sanctuary becomes covered in icons in Orthodox churches

895 The Magyars, under the leadership of Arpad, establish themselves in Hungary

886 Alfred captures London from the Danes, pressing them back into the region of Danelaw where their rule is, for the moment, tolerated

882 Oleg, leader of the Rus, seizes the town of Kiev and makes his headquarters there

878 Rhodri Mawr, or Rhodri the Great, is widely accepted as king of almost the whole of Wales

877 The Fujiwara family creates for itself a new hereditary office, that of imperial chancellor, through which it effectively rules Japan

874 Vikings arrive in Iceland and form a settlement on the site of modern Rejkjavik

871 The young Alfred leads the English in their first significant victory over the Danes, at Ashdown

870 Cyril and Methodius translate the Gospels and parts of the Old Testament into Slavonic for the Moravians.

870 Ahmad ibn Tulun, a Mameluke, seizes power in Egypt - establishing his own Tulunid dynasty

868 The Diamand Sutra has as a frontispiece a printed woodcut depicting an enthroned Buddha

868 The world's first known printed book, a Diamond Sutra, is commissioned by a Buddhist monk in honour of his parents

866 A great army of Danes captures York - the first step in the establishment of Danelaw in eastern England

866 The eastern part of the Persian empire comes under the control of the Saffarid dynasty

865 The Bulgarian king Boris I is baptized in the Greek Orthodox faith, bringing his people within the Byzantine fold

863 The missionary brothers Cyril and Methodius arrive in Moravia, where they introduce the Greek Orthodox faith in a special Slavonic liturgy

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862 During refurbishment of the mosque at Kairouan, in north Africa, a high fluted dome is added

850 The caliphs in Baghdad begin to employ Turkish slaves, or Mamelukes, in their armies

850 The three-field system, introduced by the Franks, increases agricultural yield by 33%.

850 Communal gatherings, the thing and the larger althing, are the distant origins of Scandivian parliaments

850 As a gesture of unity, Kenneth MacAlpin brings to Scone (a Pictish royal site) a sacred coronation stone associated with the Scots

850 Strip-farming gives each member of the village a stake in the communal crop, while also sharing out the good land

850 Vikings are by now securely established in the Orkneys, Shetlands and Hebrides, and in much of the Scottish mainlaid down to Loch Ness

845 On the orders of the T'ang emperor, 4000 monasteries are destroyed in China and 250,000 monks and nuns forced into secular life

843 The central Frankish kingdom, Francia Media, becomes one of the great fault lines of European history

843 Kenneth king of the Scots is accepted also as king of the Picts, providing the traditional founding event of the kingdom of Scotland

843 The division of western Europe into three kingdoms for the sons of Louis the Pious is agreed at Verdun, with lasting consequences

843 The iconoclastic controversy ends when Theodora, widow of the emperor Theophilus, officially sanctions the veneration of icons

838 Vikings from Norway capture Dublin and establish a Norse kingdom in Ireland

828 The Venetians, acquiring from Alexandria some bones believed to be those of St Mark, build St Mark's to house the valuable relic

827 The Arabs get a foothold in Sicily and begin a slow process, not complete till AD 965, of squeezing the Byzantines out of the island

825 Viking tribes known as the Rus are established as traders in the region of Novgorod

825 The discovery of the supposed remains of the apostle St James makes Santiago de Compostela a new centre of European pilgrimage

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820 The Venetians move their administration from the island of Torcello to the Rialto

816 Work begins in Rheims on the Utrecht Psalter, an outstanding example of the Carolingian illuminated manuscript

814 Charlemagne dies and his son Louis the Pious inherits the whole, now greatly extended, Frankish empire

813 Charlemage has his only surviving legitimate son, Louis the Pious, crowned as his co-emperor

811 Hemming, a Danish king, makes a treaty with the Franks establishing the river Eider as the southern border of Denmark

805 Pope Leo III consecrates Charlemagne's new palace chapel in Aachen, modelled on San Vitale in Ravenna

801 Chia Tan produces an ambitious map for the emperor, some 30 by 33 feet in size, showing the entire T'ang empire from the 9th century The ancient site of the city of Babylon is gradually abandoned and becomes covered in silt from the Euphrates, until archaelogical excavation begins in the 19th century

800 In St Peter's in Rome, on Christmas Day, pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne emperor - supposedly to Charlemagne's surprise

800 The Jews prosper in the Muslim and Carolingian empires, forming strong communities in Spain and in Germany

800 Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons

800 Seafarers colonize New Zealand, the last great island region in the Pacific to be reached by human beings

800 The luxury of Baghdad, under the caliph Harun al-Rashid, is evident in the Thousand and One Nights

800 Nestorian beliefs become the orthodoxy of the Christian community in Persia, spreading from there to India and China

800 Batán Grande, in northern Peru, becomes a great pilgrimage centre in the Sican culture

800 The script known as Carolingian minuscule (basis of the modern roman typeface) is

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developed by Alcuin and his scribes at the monastery of Tours

800 The Ismailis become a separate Shi'a sect when they dispute the succession after the death of the sixth imam

800 Scholars in Baghdad begin translating Greek and Syriac texts into Arabic

800 The style of architecture of early medieval Europe is Romanesque, in the sense of deriving from Roman examples

800 The use of zero, essential in practical mathematics, is now familiar in India and is adopted in Baghdad

796 Alcuin leaves the palace school at Aachen to become abbot of the monastery of Tours

794 The Japanese imperial court moves to a new capital city - Kyoto

793 The monks of Lindisfarne become the first known overseas victims of a Viking raid

781 Charlemagne, meeting the English scholar Alcuin on a visit to Italy, invites him to become head of the palace school in Aachen

780 The Anglo-Saxons have a name for the Celts west of Offa's dyke - wealas or Welsh, meaning foreigners

780 Islam reaches Shanga, off the east coast of Africa, with the building of a tiny wooden mosque

778 An attack on Charlemagne's army, traditionally at the pass of Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees, is later the basis for the Chanson de Roland

774 After two campaigns in Lombardy, Charlemagne establishes himself as king of the Lombards in northern Italy

772 Charlemagne destroys a great Saxon shrine, the Irminsul - the start of a 30-year campaign against his pagan neighbours in what is now Germany

771 On the death of his brother, Charlemagne inherits the entire kingdom of the Franks

768 On the death of Pepin III, the empire of the Franks is divided between his two sons - Charlemagne and his younger brother, Carloman

768 The empress of Japan, in a remarkable start to the story of printing, commissions a million copies of a Buddhist charm

762 The Abbasid caliphs create Baghdad as a new capital city on the Tigris

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756 Pepin III, after recovering Byzantine territories in Italy from the Lombards, hands control of the region to the pope in Rome

756 Abd-ar-Rahman, escaping from the massacre of his family in Syria, establishes a new Umayyad dynasty at Cordoba

753 Pope Stephen II anoints Pepin III and his two sons (one of them Charlemagne) in the abbey church of St Denis

751 Muscat and Oman establish a tradition of spiritual rule by elected imams

751 Skilled Chinese paper-makers are captured by the Arabs - beginning the slow westward transmission of the technology of paper

751 A battle at the Talas river, between the Chinese and the Arabs, is a decisive victory for the Arabs

750 The Abbasids massacre the Umayyads in Damascus and establish a new caliphate

750 Sufism develops as a mystical strain within Islam

750 The professional bards of the Germanic tribes give lasting life to Norse legend

750 The Arabic language gradually replaces Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Middle East

750 T'ang potters make vigorous and brightly coloured figures, of horses, camels or human attendants, to accompany the dead in the grave

750 Karaism, relying on scripture rather than rabbinical commentary, develops among the Jewish community in Babylon

750 With papal support Pepin III is elected king of the Franks, beginning the Carolingian dynasty (named from his father, Charles Martel)

747 The elder son of Charles Martel retires to a monastery, leaving Pepin III in control of the entire Frankish empire

743 Boniface, working as a missionary among pagan Germans, makes his headquarters at Mainz

741 Charles Martel dies and leaves the Frankish kingdoms to his two sons, Carloman and Pepin III

735 Japanese tradition gives this as the year in which the game of I-go, known in the west as go, is introduced from China

732 The Muslim advance into France is halted when Charles Martel defeats the Arabs

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between Poitiers and Tours

731 The Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people

730 Three of China's most famous poets - Wang Wei, Li Po and Tu Fu - are contemporaries during the T'ang dynasty

726 The Venetians for the first time elect their own doge, acting independently of the Byzantine governor in Ravenna

726 The emperor Leo III launches the iconoclastic controversy, sending soldiers to smash the great image of Christ over the gateway to his palace

725 The Frankish ruler Charles Martel, granting tracts of land to his nobles, lays the foundation for European feudalism

724 The civil war among the Franks ends with complete victory for Charles Martel, an illegitimate grandson of Pepin II

718 Retreating from the Arab onslaught, the Visigoths establish a kingdom of last resort in the extreme north of Spain, in Asturias

714 The death of the Frankish 'mayor of the palace' Pepin II is followed by civil war between members of his family

712 Muslims, arriving from Persia through Baluchistan, occupy the region of Sind in western India

711 Muslim Arabs cross from north Africa into Spain and drive the Visigoths from Toledo

710 The Japanese imperial court makes its capital city at Nara, based on the Chinese example of Xi'an

700 Many Anglo-Saxon kingdoms have by now amalgated, until there are just the seven of the Heptarchy

700 The ancient kingdom of Ghana is the first to be established at the southern end of the Saharan trade routes

700 The quipu is used in the Wari culture and becomes the standard recording device of the Andean civilizations

700 The earliest two Turkish states are the confederation of Gök Türk and the empire of the Khazars

700 Turkish tribes, northern neighbours of the Muslims in central Asia, begin to adopt Islam as their religion

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700 The discovery of the technique of porcelain, the most delicate of all forms of pottery, is made in China

700 The African slave trade through the Sahara is so extensive that a new town, Zawila, is established as a trading station

700 Shortage of manpower in the Muslim armies causes a change of policy, with non- Arabs now allowed to convert to Islam

698 The Lindisfarne Gospels are written and illuminated by Celtic monks on the Scottish island of Lindisfarne

698 Carthage is captured from the Byzantines by the Arabs and is finally destroyed, though Tunis will later rise nearby

695 Willibrord, recently arrived from England to convert the Frisians, is consecrated archbishop of a new see in Utrecht

691 The Dome of the Rock is completed as a Muslim shrine on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

687 With a victory at Tertry, Pepin II wins effective control over all three Frankish kingdoms

680 Husayn, the son of Ali, dies at Karbala in a battle against rival Muslims and becomes the most holy of Shi'ite martyrs

674 A Muslim fleet attacking Constantinople is deterred by the first known use of the Byzantine secret recipe for 'Greek fire'

670 With the entire middle east under their control, the Arabs make Damascus the capital of the Umayyad caliphate

670 The Arabs establish a garrison town at Kairouan, as a base for the conquest of northwest Africa

664 The king of Northumbria summons a synod at Whitby to hear the arguments of Roman and Celtic Christians, then opts for Rome

661 The emergence of the Shi'a party creates a major schism within Islam

661 Ali is assassinated and Mu'awiya becomes the fifth Muslim caliph, establishing the Umayyad dynasty

656 Othman is assassinated, and Ali wins power as the fourth Muslim caliph - defeating Muhammad's widow Aisha at the 'battle of the camel' near Basra

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650 Thonmi Sambhota, a student of Sanskrit, devises a way of writing Tibetan and produces treatises on Tibetan grammar

650 Songtsen Gampo builds temples in Lhasa for his two Buddhist wives, thus introducing the religion to Tibet

650 The Vikings develop the fast and narrow longships with which they raid across the North Sea

650 Jews and Christians, sharing with Muslims the status of 'people of the book', are promised religious tolerance in the Qur'an

650 Under the caliph Othman, the revelations made to Muhammad are collected in their definitive form as the Qur'an

650 The Book of Durrow, one of the earliest of the great Celtic manuscripts, is written and illuminated in Ireland

650 In the Frankish kingdoms the 'mayors of the palace' steadily become more powerful than their nominal masters, the Merovingian kings

650 At Dunhuang, an oasis on the Silk Road, as many as 500 caves are decorated with Buddhist murals

644 A document makes the first known reference to windmills, in use in Persia

644 After the assassination of Omar, Othman is elected as the third Muslim caliph

643 The Coptic Christians of Egypt become isolated after the Muslim conquest

642 The unopposed capture of Alexandria by the Arabs completes the Muslim conquest of Egypt

638 The Arab capture of Jerusalem brings Palestine and Syria under Muslim control

637 The Arabs defeat a Persian army at Kadisiya and then sack the city of Ctesiphon, effectively bringing to an end the Sassanian dynasty

634 Within two years of the death of Muhammad, the Arabs surge north into the Syrian desert

634 Omar, another father-in-law of Muhammad, is elected as the second Muslim caliph (the word means 'sucessor to the Messenger of God')

632 The death of Muhammad at Medina is followed by the election of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, a father-in-law of the prophet

630 Mecca becomes the holy city of Islam and soon all Arabia accepts the new religion

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627 The Byzantine emperor Heraclius recovers the True Cross from Ctesiphon

625 The treasure of an Anglo-Saxon king (possibly Raedwald, who dies at this time) is buried in a 90-foot-long ship at Sutton Hoo

622 The year of the Hegira (Muhammad's move from Mecca to Medina) becomes Anno Hegirae or AH1, the first year in Muslim chronology

622 Muhammad departs from Mecca and settles in Medina, in the event known as the Hegira

620 The Irish monk St Aidan moves from Iona to establish a monastery on Lindisfarne

618 A high official of the Sui empire seizes power and establishes one of China's greatest dynasties, the T'ang

615 When the Persians sack Jerusalem, they carry off to Ctesiphon Christianity's most sacred relic - the True Cross

614 Jerusalem falls to the Persian emperor Khosrau II after a siege of a month, and it is said that 60,000 Christians are massacred

613 Muhammad begins preaching in Mecca the message of Allah, dictated to him by the archangel Gabriel

610 The Grand Canal is constructed in China, joining a network of existing waterways to link the Yangtze and Yellow rivers

610 St Columban founds a monastery at Bobbio, the furthest outpost of Celtic Christianity

607 Prince Shotoku Taishi, an enthusiastic patron of Buddhism, builds the Horyuji temple and pagoda at Nara

600 The walls of caves at Ajanta are profusely decorated with Buddhist murals

600 The Scots, a tribal group of northern Ireland, extend their kingdom across the sea into Scotland

600 The distinction between capital and lower-case emerges in the scriptoria of the Irish monasteries

600 The classic form of Arabic poetry, predating Islam, evolves as the qasidah

600 Ritual intoning of the psalms, derived from Jewish synagogues, is formalized in Christian worship as Gregorian chant

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597 Augustine, arriving with a party of monks from Rome, reaches Canterbury and is well received by the pagan king of Kent

592 Pope Gregory I negotiates with the Lombards who are threatening Rome

591 Gregory, bishop of Tours, brings his 'History of the Franks' up to this year

589 After three centuries of chaos and disunion in China, a stable dynasty - the Sui - is established by Wen Ti (the Cultured Emperor)

589 The word filioque ('and from the Son') becomes a major bone of contention between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches

584 Byzantine Italy is brought under a new administration, or exarchate, based in Ravenna

580 St David founds monasteries in Wales and makes his base at Mynyw, a place now known after him as St David's

569 Fugitives from the Lombard invasion of northern Italy take refuge on islands in the Venetian lagoon - and become the founders of Venice

568 The Lombards invade northern Italy, and within four years occupy it as far south as the Po

563 St Columba establishes a monastery on the island of Iona, from which Celtic Christianity is carried to Scotland and northern England

552 The territories won by Clovis become divided into the two Frankish kingdoms of Austrasia and Neustria

550 If there is any historical basis for the legendary King Arthur, it is as a Celtic chieftain resisting the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth century

550 Most of Spain is by now in the hands of the Visigoths, though for a while the Byzantines win back territories in the south

550 Chess is first played at about this time, in India, before spreading west to Persia

550 Caves along the Silk Road are decorated with a profusion of carvings in the traditions of Mahayana Buddhism

550 The Slavs arrive in the Balkans and settle in all parts of the region except Albania

547 Justinian and Theodora, each with a retinue of attendants, face each other in mosaic from the walls of San Vitale in Ravenna

543 Christianity reaches the kingdom of Dongola, in present-day Sudan

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540 Khosrau I commissions a spectacular Spring Carpet for the floor of his hall of audience in Ctesiphon

540 Khosrau I builds himself a superb new palace, of which the great vaulted Taq-e Kisra remains today at Ctesiphon

538 A Buddhist image, sent as a gift from Korea, introduces the religion to Japan

537 The vast dome of Santa Sophia in Constantinople is supported on a square of four arches, making the most sophisticated use so far of the pendentive

537 The great domed church of Santa Sophia, bebuilt on the orders of Justinian, is completed after only five years of construction

535 Belisarius lands in Sicily at the start of a five-year campaign to recover Ravenna for the Byzantine emperor

535 Belisarius, conquering the Vandals in north Africa, pioneers the strategic concept of the castle

534 The codification of Roman law, ordered by Justinian, is completed

533 The Byzantine general Belisarius recovers Carthage from the Vandals

532 Theodora shows her mettle, as empress, in her response to the anarchy and terror unleashed in Constantinople by the Nika revolt

530 St Benedict founds a monastery at Monte Cassino and writes a Rule for the monks which becomes the basis of the Benedictine order

530 St Finnian founds the first of Ireland's great Celtic monasteries, at Clonard

529 Justinian closes down the schools of Athens, famous for their tradition of pagan philosophy

527 The monastery of St Catherine's in Sinai is founded by Justinian, and will accumulate one of the world's greatest collections of icons

527 Justinian becomes emperor in Constantinople, beginning a reign which will restore the empire to much of its former glory

526 By the end of his long reign Theodoric amply justifies his title 'the Great' and his place in legend as Dietrich von Bern

525 Boethius, in prison in Pavia and awaiting execution, writes the Consolation of Philosophy

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525 The law is changed to allow Justinian, of senatorial rank, to marry Theodora — whom courtesy describes as an actress

525 St Benedict gathers fellow hermits at Subiaco into a series of small monasteries

525 Dionysius Exiguus, commissioned by the pope to improve chronology, makes an error of at least four years in his selected event for AD 1

518 The Slavs cross the Danube and press southwards into the Roman provinces of Moesia and Thracia

500 Clovis and some 3000 of his soldiers are baptized in a massive ceremony at Reims

500 Mayan priests feature in stone carvings smoking pipes and puffing the smoke towards the sacred sun

500 According to Bede, the first widely accepted Anglo-Saxon ruler in southern Britain is Aelli, founder of the West Sussex kingdom

500 Beans are gathered by the Maya from wild cocoa trees and are probably used in a chocolate drink

500 The city of Tiwanaku develops to the south of Lake Titicaca, and soon dominates the surrounding region

500 The scribes known as Masoretes safeguard the ancient Hebrew of the Torah by their careful copying of the text

500 The temple city of Tikal is one of many Mayan city states of the Classic period

500 A phallic figure, the Cerne Giant, is cut on a Dorset hillside at Cerne Abbas

500 Small ivory panels, with Gospel scenes carved in relief, provide a delicate beginning to the story of Christian sculpture

500 Monks in Ireland live in stone beehive cells on rocky islands, to achieve maximum discomfort

500 The Czechs are the most powerful of the various Slav tribes by now settled in Bohemia

493 Theodoric wins Ravenna from Odoacer - by inviting Odoacer to a banquet and murdering him during the meal

487 Theodoric the Ostrogoth, threatening Constantinople, is cunningly diverted by the emperor into invading Italy

481 The 15-year-old Clovis inherits the Merovingian crown and becomes leader of the

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Franks - with his first capital at Tournai

476 The tribal leader and mercenary Odoacer becomes king of Italy - an event often taken as defining the end of the Roman empire in the west

475 The Syrian desert is full of hermits living on pillars, following the example of St Simeon Stylites

460 The mausoleum of Galla Placidia begins Ravenna's great tradition of Christian mosaic

455 Gaiseric and the Vandals enter Rome and sack the city, but their violence is perhaps restrained by Leo I

452 Attila invades and ravages northern Italy, but turns back before reaching Rome - possibly influenced by the diplomacy of Leo I

451 Attila and the Huns invade Gaul but are defeated, somewhere near Troyes, by a Roman army supported by Visigoths and Burgundians

450 St Patrick creates a strong tradition of Celtic Christianity in Ireland, from his base in Armagh

450 The squinch, soon followed by the more sophisticated pendentive, proves a great boon to builders of domes

450 Angles, Saxons and other Germanic groups invade southern England and steadily push the Celts westwards

445 Attila murders his brother and becomes the sole ruler of the Huns, who are now pressing through Dacia and across the Danube

439 Gaiseric captures Carthage and makes it his base for Vandal raids across the Mediterranean

431 Halted by a Roman army in their push southwards, the Franks settle in the Roman province of Belgica, around Tournai

431 A council is convened at Ephesus to consider the theology of Nestorius, which is judged to be heretical

418 The Visigoths, after twenty years of destructive wandering, settle in southwest France as Roman federates

413 Prompted by the fall of Rome to the Visigoths, St Augustine undertakes a great work of Christian philosophy, the City of God

413 The Burgundians cross the Rhine and settle round Worms, before moving south to

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the Savoy region

410 Alaric and the Visigoths enter Rome and plunder the city - the first foreign intruders for eight centuries

407 The Roman city of Nîmes is sacked by the Vandals, in an early indication of the gradual loss of Gaul to the Germanic tribes

406 The Vandals cross the Rhine into Gaul and move into Spain, from which the Visigoths soon push them on into Africa

405 St Jerome, in Bethlehem, completes the Latin translation of the Bible which later becomes known as the Vulgate

400 St Augustine reveals that as a young man, studying and teaching in Carthage, he often prayed for 'chastity and continence, but not yet'

400 The Yamato clan adapt Shinto to their own purposes, and claim imperial descent from the sun

400 The earlier of the two Talmuds, consisting of commentaries on the Mishnah, is collected by rabbis in Palestine

400 The Chinese solve the difficult problem of harnessing a horse without strangling it

400 Niall of the Nine Hostages is the first man to be called king of Ireland, though his direct control does not extend beyond Ulster

393 The ancient games at Olympia, with an unbroken tradition of more than 1000 years, are brought to an abrupt end by the emperor Theodosius

390 The church of Santa Pudenziana in Rome begins the great tradition of Christian mosaics

390 St Ambrose asserts the authority of the church, refusing communion to the emperor Theodosius in Milan until he does penance for a massacre

386 St Jerome settles in Bethlehem, where his holy women organize a monastery for his residence and a nearby convent for themselves

380 Roman legions begin to be withdrawn from Britain, leaving the Celtic population increasingly vulnerable

380 The Codex Sinaiticus, the earliest surviving manuscript of the complete New Testament, is copied out - probably in Egypt

380 Kalidasa, the most distinguished of India's authors in classical Sanskrit, is at the Gupta court in Patna

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379 Theodosius becomes the Roman emperor and revives Constantine's close link between church and state

378 The Visigoths inflict a devastating defeat on a Roman army at Adrianople, and win for themselves the status of Roman federates

370 The Huns, moving from the steppes north of the Black Sea, defeat the Ostrogoths and drive the Visigoths westwards - starting a chain reaction

367 A document is distributed by the bishop of Alexandria, formally establishing the contents of the New Testament

363 An apocryphal story states that Julian the Apostate, dying at Tarsus, acknowledges the victory of the Galilean, Jesus Christ

361 Julian, the new emperor in Constantinople, plans to reinstate the pagan cult of the ancient Roman empire

360 The first church of Santa Sophia in Constantinople, begun by Constantine himself, is completed

360 St Martin founds the first monastery in western Europe, at Ligugé near Poitiers

360 The Christian missionary Ulfilas devises an alphabet for the language of the Goths, so that he can translate the Bible into Gothic

350 Greece begins to find a new and influential role in a Christian context, through the Byzantine empire

350 Frumentius, brought to Ethiopia as a slave, becomes the kingdom's first Christian bishop

350 The clan ruling the Yamato plain becomes so powerful that its chieftain is seen as the emperor of Japan

350 The Cushite dynasty fades away in Nubia, after lasting for 1000 years or more

337 Constantine is at last baptized a Christian in Nicomedia, just a few days before his death

330 Constantine's new Christian city on the site of Byzantium is inaugurated, as Constantinople

327 Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, discovers in Jerusalem the cross on which Christ died - or so it is later claimed

325 Constantine convenes a council of 200 bishops at Nicaea to discuss the beliefs of

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Arius, which are deemed to be heresy

325 Constantine executes Licinius in Thessalonica on a charge of attempted rebellion, a year after defeating him in battle

320 Roman mosaic is at its most lavish in the floors of Piazza Armerina, in central Sicily

320 Constantine's new churches in Rome introduce an important element in church architecture, the transept

320 Pachomius organizes in Egypt the first community of Christian monks, at Dandara on the Nile

320 The territory of the Gupta dynasty is extended by Chandra Gupta, to include most of the great plain of the Ganges

315 Constantine founds several churches in Rome, among them the first St Peter's

314 Warming to his new Christian role, Constantine summons more than 300 bishops to Arles to discuss the controversial issue of Donatus

313 Constantine meets his co-emperor Licinius in Milan, and persuades him to follow a policy of encouraging the Christians

312 After winning the battle at Milvian Bridge, Constantine marches into Rome and is formally acknowledged by the Senate as Augustus of the west

312 Constantine, preparing for battle against a rival at the Milvian Bridge, orders his men to wear a Christian symbol, the Chi-Rho, on their shields

306 Constantine's father, recently appointed Augustus in the west, dies at York and the young man is proclaimed Augustus in his place by the legions in Britain

305 Diocletian resigns from his position as Augustus because of ill health, and retires to Dalmatia

303 The emperor Diocletian initiates a sustained persecution of Christians in the Roman empire

300 Ten dynasties and nineteen kingdoms jockey for power in the three centuries after the fall of the Han dynasty

300 The Jews of the Diaspora have by now spread through much of the Roman empire, where they are treated with tolerance

300 St Anthony, one of the early Christian hermits in the Egyptian desert, is tempted by terrifying hallucinations

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300 The Chinese transform the toe loop of nomadic horsemen into the metal stirrup

300 Horses strong enough to carry men wearing armour are put to good use by northern barbarians, and by Romans in border regions such as Dacia

284 Diocletian, commanding an army near the Bosphorus in Thracia, is proclaimed emperor by his troops

274 The emperor Aurelian, grateful for the apparent assistance of a Syrian sun god, establishes the cult of the Unconquered Sun - whose birthday is December 25

258 Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, is one of many Christians martyred for refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods

250 The Picts win a dominant position among tribes in the northern regions of Britain, or Scotland

250 The Christians of Rome use the catacombs as tomb chambers, and decorate the walls with murals on New Testament themes

250 The Persian prophet Mani establishes the dualistic Manichaean religion

250 The Goths split into two major groups, the Visigoths northwest of the Black Sea and the Ostrogoths further east

250 Roman socks, surviving in dry Egyptian tombs, are the earliest known examples of knitting

245 Origen, living in Caesarea, compiles the Hexapla, displaying versions of the Old Testament in six columns for comparative study

244 Plotinus, moving from Alexandria to Rome, teaches the influential philosophy later known as Neo-Platonism

232 A house in Doura-Europus is adapted for Christian worship - the earliest surviving example of its kind

230 Ardashir, the Persian king, commissions a relief of himself in triumphant mood - carved high on a rock face at Naqsh-e Rustam

221 The Han dynasty is brought to an end, after more than four centuries, by decades of peasant unrest

208 Ardashir is crowned king of Fars - a first step towards his founding of the Sassanian dynasty in Persia

200 The rock tombs of prosperous Petra, now incorporated in the Roman empire, are carved in the cliffs as classical temples

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200 Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi compiles the Mishnah, a six-part digest of the Oral Torah

200 The potato is cultivated in the Peruvian Andes

177 On the order of Marcus Aurelius, Christians in Lyons are tortured to death - an instance of persecution unusual at this time

175 The Han emperor in China has the six main Confucian classics engraved in stone, so that scholars may take rubbings - a first step towards printing

170 Marcus Aurelius is rare among emperors in writing twelve books of philosophical Meditations

165 The bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, on the Capitol in Rome, begins a long European tradition of public sculpture

165 The Romans annexe Doura-Europus, giving it its most prosperious period as a frontier town between the Roman and Persian empires

161 Marcus Aurelius, for long the designated heir, becomes emperor on the death of Antoninus Pius

158 A new doctor, Galen, is appointed to look after the gladiators at Pergamum

150 Ptolemy writes in Alexandria an encyclopedic account of Greek scientific theory in cosmology, astronomy and geography

150 London develops as a prosperous trading centre, at the hub of the network of Roman roads in Britain

142 The emperor Antoninus Pius gives orders for the construction of a defensive earthwork, to the north of Hadrian's Wall

138 The emperor Hadrian, with no children of his own, appoints a respected senator, Antoninus Pius, to succeed him

135 After the Roman recovery of Jerusalem from Simon Bar-Cochba, all Jews are expelled from the city

134 The Sant'Angelo bridge in Rome, still standing today, is built for the emperor Hadrian by means of a coffer dam

132 Simon Bar-Cochba drives the Romans out of Jerusalem and holds it for three years, until a large Roman army recovers the city

130 Hadrian, visiting Jerusalem, decides to rebuild it as a Roman city - an act which provokes the final Jewish uprising

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125 Suetonius, librarian to Trajan and personal secretary to Hadrian, is well placed to research his racy Lives of the Caesars

122 The emperor Hadrian, visiting Britain, orders the construction of a great wall from coast to coast to keep out the Caledonian tribes

120 The Pantheon, roofed with the most spectacular dome of antiquity, is built in Rome by Hadrian

120 Kanishka rules the Kushan empire of Afghanistan and northern India from his capital at Peshawar

117 Hadrian, governing Syria when he is declared emperor, is confident enough to delay almost a year before returning to Rome

106 After two campaigns by Trajan the rich region of Dacia (today's Romania) is brought under Rome's control

105 The eunuch Ts'ai Lun either invents paper or presents a report on the new substance to the Chinese emperor

105 A bridge is built over the river Tagus at Alcántara and stands today as a fine example of Roman technology

100 Buddhism, arriving with trade along the Silk Road from India, puts down firm roots in China

100 The first accounts of Scotland, written by the Romans, name the Caledonii as the most important tribe of the region

100 The network of Roman roads stretches eventually from England to Egypt

100 Teotihuacan, the dominant city in the northern highlands of central America, introduces the god Quetzalcoatl

100 Realistic portraits, done in hot wax and preserved in coffins at Fayyum, vividly depict inhabitants of Roman Egypt

100 Theravada Buddhism, strong in south India and Sri Lanka, travels with traders through southeast Asia

100 The Celtic chieftains of Britain adapt willingly to Roman customs and comforts

100 Mecca develops into a place of pilgrimage, with a famous collection of idols in the Ka'ba

100 Sculptors in the Roman empire develop the most brutally realistic convention in the

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history of portraiture

100 A cult develops in Rome of the Egyptian goddess Isis, credited with restoring to life her hushand, Osiris, after he has been hacked to pieces

100 A naturalistic style of Buddhist sculpture develops in the Gandhara region, part of modern Pakistan

98 Trajan, succeeding to the imperial throne in AD 98, is sufficiently confident to spend a year in Germany before returning to Rome

98 Tacitus begins his career with two specialized but influential works of history, one on Britain and the other on Germany

83 Agricola defeats the tribes of Scotland at an unidentified place called Mons Graupius, probably almost as far north as Aberdeen

81 Dying after a reign of only two years, Titus is succeeded on the imperial throne by his brother, Domitian

80 The Colosseum is inaugurated by the emperor Titus with games lasting 100 days, in which some 9000 large animals are killed

80 The earliest of the Christian gospels, that of St Mark, is written down - possibly in Asia Minor or Syria

79 A sudden eruption of Vesuvius buries the town of Pompeii in volcanic ash, in places twelve feet deep

79 Titus becomes emperor on the death of his father, Vespasian, and begins a brief two-year reign of lavish public generosity

77 Agricola, appointed Roman governor of Britain in AD 77, establishes Chester as a stronghold from which to control the Welsh tribes

75 The dioptra, developed by Hero of Alexandria for surveying land, is an early form of theodolite

75 The Acts of the Apostles are written, probably by Luke – the evangelist and companion of Paul on his final journey to Rome

75 Hero, a Greek scientist in Alexandria, devises various forms of steam engine

73 The last of the Jewish insurgents are besieged in the stronghold of Masada, eventually killing each other to end their ordeal

70 The first yeshiva, established by Johanan ben Zakkai at Yavne, begins a strong tradition of Jewish scholarship in the Diaspora

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70 The complete destruction of the Jewish Temple follows the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans

70 Titus recovers Jerusalem for Rome, after four years of Jewish rule

69 Vespasian, proclaimed emperor by his troops in Alexandria, is the survivor among this year's four emperors

69 A rebellion in Spain prompts such chaos that Rome has four emperors within a year, after the suicide of Nero in 68

68 The Essenes hide their sacred scrolls in caves near the Dead Sea, to save them from the Romans

66 Nero comes to Athens to give some of his officially celebrated performances at the Greek games

66 Josephus is in Jerusalem at the start of the rebellion against the Romans, and will later describe its suppression in his Jewish War

66 The Zealots play a prominent part in the uprising which expels the Romans from Jerusalem

64 Early Christian tradition states that both Peter and Paul meet death in Rome as martyrs, possibly as a result of the fire of AD 64

64 A great fire in Rome is popularly believed to have been started by Nero, whom legend also accuses of fiddling while the city burns

60 Boudicca launches a devastating attack on Roman soldiers and settlers, destroying their headquarters at Colchester

60 St Paul arrives in Rome a prisoner, but then spends two years freely preaching Christianity

60 St Peter, believed to have come to Rome as leader of the Christian community, is subsequently considered the first pope

54 The 16-year-old Nero is proclaimed emperor by the praetorian guards after the death of Claudius, supposedly poisoned by toadstools

50 Tribes speaking Finno-Ugric languages are by now settled around the northeast of the Baltic, in modern Estonia and Finland

50 The leaders of the Christian church gather in Jerusalem to decide an urgent question - must Gentile converts undergo circumcision?

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50 A working week of seven days is adopted in Rome, based on the seven known planets (whose names provide the days)

50 A western adaptation of the Persian cult of Mithras, evolving probably in Anatolia, is spread through the empire by the Roman army

50 The Thessalonians receive the first of Paul's epistles - the earliest text in the New Testament, written in Greek

50 The Roman surgeon Cornelius Celsus describes in De Medicina how to cut stones from a patient's bladder

48 St Paul, on his travels within the Roman empire, begins converting non-Jews (or Gentiles) to the new Christian faith

48 St Paul, taking ship to Cyprus, begins the first of his great missionary journeys

47 Roman legions build the Fosse Way, a raised road with a ditch on each side stretching from Lincoln to Devon

43 The Roman emperor Claudius reaches Colchester, where a temple is erected to him as a god

43 The emperor Claudius catches up with the Roman army, waiting at the Thames for him to lead the final victory over the English tribes

43 The Romans invade Britain and the tribal leader Caractacus fails to hold them in an encounter near the Medway

41 Herod Agrippa, a grandson of Herod the Great, restores a brief calm to Palestine

41 Claudius, after the assassination of his nephew Caligula, is selected as emperor by the praetorian guards

40 The death of Cymbeline is a prelude to the renewed Roman invasion of Celtic Britain

37 Within the tangled and tormented web of the Roman imperial family, Gaius Caesar - nicknamed Caligula - inherits the throne

35 On the road to Damascus, where he intends to persecute the Christians, Saul sees a blinding light

35 Stephen is stoned outside the city wall of Jerusalem - the first Christian martyr

31 Peter becomes the leader of the small community of Christians in Jerusalem

31 Jesus Christ is crucified, according to the accounts of his followers, outside the city

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wall of Jerusalem

31 Jesus is brought before Pontius Pilate who reluctantly sentences him to death for blasphemy

31 Jesus, at the Last Supper, associates the bread and wine with his own body and blood, establishing the sacrament of the Eucharist

31 Jesus rides into Jerusalem with a crowd of followers, then attacks the traders in the courtyard of the Temple

29 Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee, gathering disciples, preaching and healing

23 The Han dynasty recovers control, after a 15-year interlude, and moves the capital to Loyang - starting the Eastern Han period

20 The Romans construct the massive Pont du Gard to bring water to the city of Nîmes

20 Saul of Tarsus, later known as St Paul, has a Greek-speaking Jewish father who is a Roman citizen

19 Germanicus, nephew and heir of the emperor Tiberius, dies when far away with the army in Syria

14 Tiberius succeeds his stepfather Augustus Caesar as the Roman emperor

14 The death of Augustus introduces half a century of chaos, as the members of his family compete ruthlessly for power

9 The defeat of three Roman legions in the Teutoberg Forest by Arminius, establishes the Rhine as a natural boundary of the Roman empire

5 Germanicus, designated eventual heir to the throne, marries Agrippina, granddaughter of the ruling emperor

4 Augustus Caesar insists on Tiberius adopting as his successor Germanicus, a talented young member of the imperial family

4 After the death of two of his grandsons, the emperor Augustus formally adopts his stepson Tiberius as his successor

10 BC The period of stability achieved during the reign of Augustus Caesar has been given the name Pax Romana ('Roman peace')

4 BC Herod, according to the Gospel account, orders all newly born infants in Bethlehem to be killed

1 Christians decide (though not until AD 525) that this is the year of Christ's birth,

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making it AD 1 in the Christian chronology

4 BC Herod, according to the Gospel account, orders all newly born infants in Bethlehem to be killed

6 BC According to the Gospel account, Jesus Christ is born in Bethlehem two years before the death of Herod the Great - making the date 6 BC

19 BC Virgil dies just after completing the Aeneid, and imperial command from Augustus Caesar prevents his executor from destroying the epic

20 BC The Netherlands, or 'low countries' around the Rhine delta, enter history as the Roman province of Germania Inferior

20 BC Roman author Vitruvius writes De Architectura, now generally known as The Ten Books of Architecture

20 BC Augustus Caesar puts a team of surveyors to work mapping the empire's 50,000 miles of roads, a task which will take them twenty years

20 BC A collection of witty love poems, entitled Amores, brings Ovid an early success

20 BC The excellence of the arts, particularly literature, during the reign of Augustus Caesar causes it to be remembered as a golden age of culture

20 BC Herod the Great, king of Judaea, begins to build a spectacular new Temple for the Jews on the sacred mount in Jerusalem

23 BC The first three books of Horace's Odes are published, written on his Sabine farm

23 BC Sukune, according to tradition, wins the first sumo wrestling contest and becomes patron saint of the sport

27 BC Livy begins writing and publishing his History of Rome, a task which will occupy him for forty years

27 BC Octavian is given the life-long title of Augustus by the senate in Rome, becoming in effect the first Roman emperor

29 BC When Octavian's Egyptian hoard reaches Rome, the standard rate of interest falls from 12% to 4%

30 BC With the annexation of Egypt, the entire Mediterranean falls under Roman control

30 BC Octavian annexes Egypt as a Roman territory and takes back to Rome the vast treasures of the Egyptian pharaohs

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30 BC The Egyptians declare Caesarion to be their pharaoh, but it is not long before he is executed by Octavian - bringing to an end the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt

30 BC Cleopatra commits suicide, applying a poisonous asp to her breast,

30 BC Hearing that Cleopatra is dead (false news, as it turns out), Mark Antony commits suicide in Alexandria

30 BC Octavian arrives in Egypt with an army, and holds Cleopatra a prisoner in her palace in Alexandria

31 BC Octavian defeats the forces of Antony and Cleopatra (both are at sea with their fleets) in a battle off the Greek coast at Actium

34 BC In a spectacular cerermony known as the Donations of Alexandria, Mark Antony distributes the eastern Roman territories between Cleopatra, her eldest son (Caesarion) and his own three children

34 BC Maecenas buys a farm for Horace, in the Sabine hills near Tivoli - the most fruitful of his many acts of patronage

36 BC Cleopatra gives birth to another son of Mark Antony's and calls him Ptolemy Philadelphus

37 BC Herod, appointed king of Judaea by the senate in Rome, establishes his rule over Palestine

37 BC Antony and Cleopatra, accompanied by their three-year-old twins, marry in Antioch

37 BC Virgil's reputation is established by his ten Eclogues, influenced by the Italian countryside in the region of his birth near Mantua

40 BC Cleopatra gives birth to twins and calls them Alexander and Cleopatra

41 BC Mark Antony spends the winter with Cleopatra in Alexandria

41 BC Cleopatra persuades Mark Antony to execute her sister Arsinoe, thus removing her last potential rival in the Egyptian royal family

41 BC Keeping her appointment with Mark Antony in Tarsus, Cleopatra arrives in a golden barge, dressed as the goddess of love – and he proves susceptible

41 BC Mark Antony summons Cleopatra to visit him in Tarsus, to answer rumours that she has been disloyal to the empire

42 BC After their victory at Philippi, Octavian returns to Rome and Mark Antony

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remains in the east to control the extremities of the empire

42 BC Octavian and Mark Antony defeat the armies of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, after which Brutus and Cassius commit suicide

43 BC Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus meet in Bologna and form an alliance known as the second triumvirate

44 BC Cleopatra's brother and co-ruler, Ptolemy XIV, dies – probably at her command

44 BC Cleopatra appoints Caesarion, now aged three, her co-ruler and heir

44 BC Soon after the assassination of Caesar, Cleopatra and Caesarion return to Egypt

44 BC Octavian, an 18-year-old student in Apollonia, hears that he has been named by his uncle, Julius Caesar, as his successor and heir

44 BC Mark Antony gives a dramatic speech in praise of Caesar, calming the crowd but also positioning himself for the next stage in an ongoing power struggle

44 BC On March 15, the Ides of March, Julius Caesar is stabbed to death during a meeting of the senate

45 BC Julius Caesar's new calendar is introduced, at a time when its predecessor has become out of step with the seasons by three months

45 BC In the final act of his long struggle with supporters of Pompey, Julius Caesar defeats their last survivors at Munda in Spain

46 BC A town is founded by Julius Caesar on the ruined site of Carthage, and eventually flourishes as Colonia Julia Carthago

46 BC Cleopatra travels to Rome with Caesarion, whom Caesar now officially recognizes as his son

46 BC Julius Caesar goes to Africa to confront the remainder of Pompey's forces, and defeats them at Thapsus – but two of Pompey's sons escape to Spain

46 BC Vercingetorix is a prize exhibit in Caesar's great triumph in Rome, but the Celtic chieftain is strangled once the procession is over

47 BC Julius Caesar concludes a campaign in Asia Minor so speedily that he declares, succinctly, Veni, vidi, vici ('I came, I saw, I conquered')

47 BC Cleopatra gives birth to a son and calls him Ptolemy XV Caesar (later known by the nickname Caesarion)

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47 BC Julius Caesar leaves Alexandria to travel with his army by the land route back to Italy, through Turkey

47 BC Cleopatra acquires a new co-ruler and husband in the form of another young brother, now Ptolemy XIV

47 BC Ptolemy XIII is either killed or accidentally drowns while attempting to escape across the Nile

47 BC Forces of Caesar and Cleopatra defeat Ptolemy XIII in a battle fought in the Nile delta

48 BC Julius Caesar, now fifty-two, meets the 21-year-old Cleopatra in Alexandria and they become lovers

48 BC Caesar, reaching Egypt, is not pleased when sent by Ptolemy XIII the gift of Pompey's severed head, already embalmed

48 BC Pompey, seeking in Egypt refuge from Caesar, is first welcomed and then murdered by the faction of Ptolemy XIII

48 BC Julius Caesar defeats his rival Pompey at Pharsalus, in Greece, and makes himself master of the Roman world

48 BC Civil war breaks out in Egypt between Ptolemy XIII and his sister Cleopatra, each scheming to become sole ruler

49 BC Julius Caesar moves fast to drive Pompey's supporters from Italy and to crush forces loyal to him in Spain

49 BC Pompey flees from Rome at the approach of Caesar, and boards a ship at Brindisi to sail eastwards

49 BC Julius Caesar crosses the river Rubicon (the southern boundary of Gaul) with his army – and in doing so launches a civil war

50 BC A doctrinal split emerges within Jainism over whether a devotee must go naked (sky clad) or may be allowed a simple robe (white clad)

50 BC The Maya introduce a calendar which has a cycle of fifty-two years, known as the Calendar Round

50 BC The senate, controlled by Pompey and his faction, orders Caesar to disband his army and return to Rome

50 BC The Great Stupa at Sanchi is the earliest surviving Buddhist stupa

50 BC Gladiators have metal studs on their boxing gloves, and a public bout is

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expected to go on until the loser dies

50 BC A body preserved in the tannin of Lindow Moss, an English peat bog, is probably a sacrificial victim of the Druids

50 BC The Phoenicians discover that a blob of molten glass can be puffed out to form a hollow vessel

51 BC The Xiongnu split into two hordes, one of them submitting to China and the other moving west

51 BC In the Ptolemaic tradition, Cleopatra marries her brother Ptolemy XIII and at the age of eighteen is joint ruler of Egypt

51 BC Ptolemy XII dies, leaving Egypt to his young son, now Ptolemy XIII, and to his older daughter Cleopatra

52 BC In his winter quarters Julius Caesar writes The Gallic War, an account of his own achievements in suppressing the Gauls

52 BC The Celtic leader Vercingetorix inflicts an unaccustomed defeat on Julius Caesar, at Gergovia, but is captured later in the year

53 BC The death of Crassus at Carrhae brings to an end the first triumvirate

53 BC Crasssus is killed at Carrhae, in Turkey, when the Parthians defeat his army, largely thanks to their brilliance as mounted archers

54 BC Julius Caesar returns to Britain for a second visit, this time reaching north of the Thames into the kingdom of Cassivellaunus

55 BC Julius Caesar makes the first of his two invasions of Celtic Britain

57 BC Silla becomes the first of the three kingdoms of Korea, followed by Koguryo in 37 BC and Paekche in 18 BC

58 BC Julius Caesar begins the long slow process of pushing Roman occupation steadily northwards in France (or Gaul)

58 BC At the end of his year as consul, Caesar travels north to become governor of northern Italy and southern France

59 BC Caesar and Pompey use violence and intimidation to force through the senate a bill giving public land to retired soldiers (with Pompey's men at the head of the queue)

59 BC The alliance between Pompey and Caesar is sealed when Pompey marries

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Caesar's only daughter, Julia

60 BC Julius Caesar persuades Pompey and Crassus to join him in a political alliance to their mutual advantage, known now as the first triumvirate

60 BC Back in Rome, Caesar stands in the election to become one of the two consuls for the year 59, and wins

61 BC Caesar sets off to take up a post as governor of southern Spain, where a series of profitable raids improve his finances

61 BC Caesar's numerous creditors prevent him leaving Rome until the immensely wealthy Marcus Licinius Crassus stands bail for some of his debts

62 BC An unproven rumour about Pompeia causes Caesar to divorce her on the grounds that 'Caesar's wife must be above suspicion'

63 BC Caesar is elected Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of the Roman state religion

63 BC Pompey captures Jerusalem, bringing Judaea under Roman control

64 BC Phoenicia is incorporated into the Roman province of Syria, with Tyre and Sidon retaining a measure of self-government

64 BC The Seleucid dynasty ends when Syria, the last remnant ruled by his family, falls to the Romans

64 BC The Roman annexation of Syria brings the Silk Road all the way to the Mediterranean

64 BC Pompey takes Antioch and brings Syria under control as a Roman province

67 BC Julius Caesar marries Pompeia, a granddaughter of Sulla and a distant relative of Pompey

69 BC Julius Caesar's wife, Cornelia Cinna, dies

69 BC Cleopatra, destined to become the last ruling pharaoh as Cleopatra VII, is born in Egypt – the daughter of Ptolemy XII

73 BC A rebellion by Spartacus and other slaves from a gladiators' training camp at Capua lasts for two years before it is suppressed

75 BC Julius Caesar, captured by pirates on his way to Rhodes, warns them that he will crucify them - and later keeps his word

75 BC To improve his skills as an orator, Julius Caesar travels to Rhodes to study with Cicero's teacher, Apollonius Molon

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78 BC Sulla dies and Caesar returns to Rome, taking up a legal career as an advocate

80 BC The 26-year-old Pompey conducts such a successful campaign in Africa that his soldiers hail him as Pompey the Great

81 BC Cicero, whose speeches become models of oratory, makes his first appearance in a Roman court

82 BC To escape from Italy Caesar joins the army, and serves in Asia with distinction (winning the Civic Crown for courage in action)

82 BC Sulla launches a massacre of his opponents and Julius Caesar is lucky to escape with his life, but his inheritance is confiscated

82 BC Sulla takes Rome for the second time, after a battle at the Colline Gate, and then publishes his lethal 'proscriptions'

84 BC Julius Caesar marries Cornelia Cinna, whose family, like Caesar's own, are in the faction opposed to Sulla

85 BC Julius Caesar's father dies, and in his teens he becomes head of the family

86 BC Gaius Marius, uncle of Julius Caesar, marches on Rome and massacres many of the supporters of Sulla

86 BC Sulla, campaigning to the east, besieges Athens and then allows his army to loot the city

88 BC The Roman general Sulla takes the unprecedented step of marching upon Rome with a Roman army, to restore his own faction to power

90 BC A three-year war, known as the Social War, breaks out between Rome and her Italian allies

100 BC The practice of acupuncture is described in Nei Qing, a Chinese medical text

100 BC The Parthians develop the site of Ctesiphon, on the east bank of the Tigris opposite Seleucia

100 BC Julius Caesar is born into a patrician Roman family

100 BC Hindu temple sculptors develop a sinuous and full-bodied style for the naked female form

100 BC A Venus is carved in marble, and centuries later becomes an ideal of female beauty after being found on the island of Milo

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100 BC The Essenes, a Jewish sect, withdraw from secular life to form monastic c ommunities in the desert

102 BC The Roman general Gaius Marius defeats the Teutones, a German tribe which has made deep inroads into southern Gaul

102 BC The Roman general Gaius Marius defeats the Teutones, a German tribe which has made deep inroads into southern Gaul

106 BC A caravan leaves China with goods destined for Persia - proof that the eastern half of the Silk Road is now open

120 BC Sima Qian undertakes (and carries through against unusual odds) a major survey of Chinese history

120 BC Antipater, a Greek author living on the Phoenician coast, lists the seven wonders of the world

121 BC The tribune Gaius Gracchus is murdered by an armed group, led by a consul, after which 3000 of his supporters are rounded up and executed

121 BC The Romans establish a province in the south of France, still acknowledged in the name Provence

125 BC Under the Han dynasty the Confucians become the official civil servants in China, with entry to the service regulated by examination

126 BC Zhang Qian reaches Bactria and is the first to bring news of western Asia back to China

129 BC Hipparchus completes the first scientific star catalogue, mapping some 850 stars

130 BC Hipparchus proposes a grid of 360° of latitude and longitude for mapmaking

130 BC The Greek astronomer Hipparchus, mapping the stars, observes but cannot explain the precession of the equinoxes

133 BC The tribune Tiberius Gracchus is murdered by a mob which includes Roman senators

138 BC Zhang Qian, a Chinese diplomat, begins a spell of twelve years as a captive of the nomadic horde, the Xiongnu

139 BC A secret ballot is instituted for Roman citizens, who mark their vote on a tablet and place it in an urn

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140 BC The priestly Sadducees are confronted in the Sanhedrin by a new opposition party - the Pharisees

140 BC The Greek astronomer Hipparchus is credited with the invention of the astrolabe, measuring the angle of sun or star above the horizon

141 BC Simon the Maccabee is appointed high priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, with the position declared hereditary in his family

146 BC Carthage is destroyed by the Romans at the end of the Third Punic War

149 BC Rome picks a quarrel with Carthage to begin the Third Punic War

150 BC The earliest inscriptions in an American script are those of the Zapotecs, from about this period

160 BC The Roman statesman Cato the Elder writes Origines ('Origins'), a history of Rome which survives only in fragments

165 BC The Jewish leader Judas the Maccabee captures Jerusalem and cleanses the Temple

168 BC Antiochus IV places a statue of Zeus above the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem, provoking violent reactions from the Jews

170 BC Parchment is invented by Eumenes II, king of Pergamum, according to traditional accounts

176 BC The Yuezhi, defeated by the Xiongnu, move west - before eventually descending into Bactria and northwest India

183 BC Hannibal, to avoid falling into Roman hands, commits suicide in the Bithynian town of Libyssa

185 BC Plautus and Terence, in the second and third century BC, create a Roman drama based on Greek originals

188 BC Sparta's ancient political system comes to an end, but the ordeal by flogging lingers on as a tourist attraction in the temple of Artemis

196 BC The text of the Rosetta stone is chiselled into a black basalt slab in the three scripts hieroglyphic Egyptian, demotic Egyptian, and Greek

196 BC Priests issue a decree on the first anniversary of the accession of Ptolemy V – it is the first three-script inscription to have been discovered, known now as the Rosetta Stone

196 BC The Romans, after defeating Macedon, announce at the Isthmian Games that

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all Greek states are now free under Roman protection

200 BC The Mochica develop a civilization, in the north of modern Peru, known for its realistic pottery sculpture

200 BC The oasis city of Palmyra acquires importance on the caravan route between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean

200 BC Seafarers reach and colonize the Pacific island of Samoa

200 BC Indian cavalrymen ride with their big toes in loops of leather or fabric - a first step towards the stirrup

200 BC The earth drawings of the Nazca people, known now as the Nazca Lines, are some of the largest works of art ever created

218 BC Hannibal crosses the Alps with his elephants, beginning the Second Punic War

220 BC The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes calculates the circumference of the world with the help of shadows and camels

221 BC Hannibal succeeds to the command of the Carthaginian forces in Spain, on the death of his brother-in-law Hasdrubal

221 BC The ruthless Qin dynasty establishes control over the whole of central China

221 BC After 800 years the Zhou dynasty is brought to an end by the ruler of the Qin kingdom

225 BC A treaty defines the Ebro river as the Spanish boundary between Carthage and Rome

227 BC Sardinia and Corsica are annexed by Rome, becoming the second Roman overseas province

228 BC Hamilcar Barca dies fighting in Spain, after establishing a strong Carthaginian presence in the peninusula

239 BC Ptolemy III issues the Decree of Canopus, the earliest known in the Ptolemaic series of public decrees inscribed in stone in two languages and three scripts

240 BC Spain, with its mines of gold, silver and copper, is a hotly disputed region between Carthage and Rome

241 BC At the end of the First Punic War, Sicily becomes Rome's first overseas province

241 BC A Roman naval victory at Trapani, off the northwest tip of Sicily, completes the

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blockade of the Carthaginians and ends the First Punic War

250 BC To help the king of Syracuse extract water from the hold of a ship (so the story goes), Archimedes invents the screw now known by his namec.

250 BC Buddhism reaches Sri Lanka as a result of the missionary efforts of the Indian ruler, Asoka

250 BC The Romans evolve a system of numerals which, until the end of the Middle Ages, is a handicap to western arithmetic

250 BC The digits known now as Arabic numerals make their first tentative appearance in India

250 BC The first alchemists, working in Alexandria, are also the world's first experimental chemists

250 BC The Chinese develop the crossbow, many centuries before its use in Europe

250 BC Asoka, extending his rule over much of India, proclaims his Buddhist faith on pillars and in rock inscriptions

250 BC Archimedes (it is said) leaps out of his bath shouting eureka ('I have found it') when he perceives how to test for relative density

250 BC The organ, using a mechanical device to pump air through a set of musical pipes, is invented in Alexandria by Ctesibius

260 BC The new Roman fleet wins a decisive victory over the Carthaginians at Mylae, thanks largely to the 'raven' (corvus in Latin)

260 BC A Carthaginian quinquereme, captured by the Romans, is used as the model for the first Roman fleet - constructed in two months

260 BC The 500,000 scrolls in the library at Alexandria are listed in a catalogue, which itself runs to 120 scrolls

264 BC The first gladiatorial contests in Rome are part of the entertainment at a funeral, and soon become popular

264 BC A clash in Sicily, between Rome and Carthage, leads to the First Punic War

270 BC On the small Greek island of Samos an astronomer, Aristarchus, comes to the startling conclusion that the earth is in orbit round the sun

272 BC Asoka, a devotee of Buddhism, wins the Mauryan throne and establishes India's first empire

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280 BC The Jews of Alexandria commission the Greek translation of the Old Testament which becomes known as the Septuagint

280 BC A great lighthouse, subsequently one of the Seven Wonders of the World, is built on the island of Pharos, off Alexandria

280 BC The Alexandrian school of medicine develops an alarming form of clinical anatomy – human vivisection

280 BC The Jewish community of Alexandria coins the word diaspora for Jews living far from Israel

281 BC Pyrrhus lands in Italy, with 25,000 men and 20 elephants, to fight for the Greek colony of Tarentum against the Romans

292 BC The Colossus, a giant statue of Helios the sun god, is erected beside the harbour of Rhodes

299 BC Seleucus founds Antioch as a Greek city on the trade route between Mesopotamia and Europe

299 BC The Roman siege technique is improved by the 'tortoise' which protects the attacking force

300 BC Phoenicia is brought into the new Hellenistic empire, changing hands frequently between contending successors of Alexander

300 BC Epicurus postulates a universe of indestructible atoms in which man himself is responsible for achieving a balanced life

300 BC The Indian epic of romance and adventure, the Ramayana, is probably the work of a single author at about this time

300 BC Vesta, goddess of the hearth, is served in Rome by virgin priestesses who tend the sacred flame in her shrine

300 BC - AD 100 The people of Paracas, a coastal region of central Peru, create extremely sophisticated fabrics of woven cotton or vicuña wool

300 BC Euclid, teaching at the museum in Alexandria, writes what becomes Europe's standard textbook on geometry

300 BC The flexibility of the Roman legion transforms the Greek phalanx into an even more effective fighting machine

300 BC The Greek author Theophrastus writes On the History of Plants, the earliest surviving work on botany

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300 BC The Celts move across the Channel into Britain, soon becoming the dominant ethnic group in the island

300 BC Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma emerge as India's trio of main gods, with the Vedic religion of the Aryans evolving into Hinduism

301 BC Some 20 years after the death of Alexander the Great one of his generals, Ptolemy, extends his rule from Egypt to include Jerusalem

310 BC Alexander IV and his mother Roxana are murdered by order of Cassander (by now the self-proclaimed king of Macedonia)

310 BC Pytheas, a Greek explorer, sails up the west coast of Britain and finds beyond it more northerly land which he calls Thule

312 BC The first Roman road, the Via Appia, links Rome with Capua

312 BC Seleucia is founded as a new capital on the Tigris, eclipsing Babylon and recycling much of the older city as building material

317 BC Philip III is killed on the orders of Olympias, the mother of Alexander

320 BC Ptolemy begins to transform Alexandria into a centre of Greek culture, founding his famous 'museum' and library

321 BC Chandragupta Maurya seizes the throne of Magadha, in India, and establishes the Mauryan dynasty

322 BC Alexander's corpse, hijacked by Ptolemy, becomes a sacred relic in Alexandria

323 BC Seleucus wins control of a vast area, comprising the eastern part of Alexander's empire from the Mediterranean to India

323 BC Ptolemy manages to acquire Alexander the Great's corpse, to lend authority to his rule in Egypt

323 BC In the carve up of Alexander the Great's empire, Ptolemy wins Egypt and founds the Ptolemaic dynasty – with himself as the pharaoh Ptolemy I

323 BC Real power will remain with the Macedonian generals, who after much dispute divide up Alexander's empire among themselves

323 BC Alexander's generals decide that the joint heirs to his throne shall be his half- brother (Philip III) and his posthumous son by Roxana (Alexander IV) from 323 BC The spread of Greek rule by Alexander introduces the Hellenistic age, which will last for three centuries

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323 BC Alexander, still only 33, dies in Babylon following a banquet

324 BC When the army reaches Ecbatana, Hephaestion dies of a fever and the grief- stricken Alexander erects shrines in his memory

324 BC Alexander and his companion Hephaestion marry daughters of Darius III

324 BC Back in Persia, to emphasize that Greece and Persia are now one, Alexander marries eighty of his senior officers to Persian wives

325 BC In the Indian monsoon Alexander's Greek troops have finally had enough and threaten to mutiny unless he turns for home

326 BC Alexander's famous horse Bucephalus dies in India and is commemorated in the name of a new town, Bucephala

327 BC Alexander takes a major new step, leaving Persian territory and moving through the mountain passes into India

327 BC Alexander marries Roxana after subduing the territories of her father, a Bactrian chief in the modern region of Aghanistan

330 BC Alexander begins two years moving with his army through his vast new territories, establishing Greek settlements

330 BC Alexander adopts the ceremonial dress and court rituals of of his new Persian empire

330 BC As a conclusive end to the long rivalry between Greece and Persia, Alexander destroys the great palace of Xerxes at Persepolis

330 BC Aristotle tackles wide-ranging subjects on a systematic basis, leaving to his successors an encyclopedia of contemporary thought

331 BC Moving northeast into Mesopotamia, Alexander again defeats Darius III (at Gaugamela), leaving Persia open to his advances

331 BC Alexander travels far into the desert, to a famous oracle of the sun god Amon (or Amon-Re) at Siwah, where the priest recognizes him as the son of the god

332 BC While in Egypt, Alexander founds Alexandria – the best known of the many towns he establishes to spread Greek culture

332 BC In Memphis Alexander sacrifices to Apis, a sacred bull, and is crowned pharaoh by the priests

332 BC Alexander the Great's army arrives in Egypt and the Persian governor of the province rapidly surrenders

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332 BC Tyre, the only coastal city to offer serious resistance to Alexander, is taken and destroyed after a siege of seven months

332 BC Alexander moves south through Syria and Palestine, excluding the Persian fleet from their familiar harbours

333 BC At Gordium, in central Turkey, Alexander is credited with cutting the mythical Gordian Knot (identifying him as the ruler of Asia)

333 BC At Issus, close to the Turkish border with Syria, Alexander defeats the Persian emperor Darius III, captures his family and treats them with courtesy

334 BC At the river Granicus, not far from Troy, Alexander defeats a Persian army employing many Greek mercenaries

334 BC Alexander is presented in Troy with a shield, said to have been dedicated by Athena to the Trojans, which will always accompany him into battle

334 BC Alexander, recreating a classic Greek ceremony, runs naked in Troy to the supposed tomb of Achilles to place a garland

334 BC Indulging in a moment of romantic tourism, Alexander visits Troy at the start of his Persian campaign

334 BC The 21-year-old Alexander the Great marches east with some 5000 cavalry and 30,000 footsoldiers

335 BC Before departing for the east, Alexander destroys Thebes and enslaves the Thebans for rebelling against the League of Corinth

336 BC The League of Corinth elects Alexander to take his father's place as leader of the campaign against Persia

336 BC At a summer feast to celebrate the wedding of his daughter, Philip of Macedon is murdered by one of his courtiers

336 BC An advance guard of 10,000 troops sets off towards Persia in the spring, with Philip due to follow later with the main army

337 BC The League of Corinth resolves to launch a war against Persia, with Philip II in command of the confederate forces

337 BC Philip of Macedon persuades most of the Greek city-states, brought together in Corinth, to agree to a military alliance with himself as leader

338 BC Philip of Macedon defeats Athens and Thebes at Chaeronaea, giving him control of Greece

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340 BC The Macedonians develop the catapult as a siege engine for the armies of Philip II and Alexander the Great

340 BC Alexander the Great, at the age of sixteen, conducts his first successful military campaign – against the Thracians

340 BC The theatre at Epidaurus is the earliest and best surviving example of a classical Greek stage and auditorium

343 BC Homer's Iliad becomes a profound source of inspiration to Alexander, who will keep scrolls of the text in his tent during his conquests

343 BC Hephaestion, Alexander's closest lifelong friend, may have been among the small group taught by Aristotle

343 BC Aristotle is employed in Macedon as tutor to the 13-year-old heir to the throne, Alexander

348 BC The citizens of Olynthus abandon their houses, with elaborate mosaic floors, when their city is attacked by Philip of Macedon

350 BC The Mahabharata, India's great national epic, begins to take shape

350 BC The brutal philosophy of Legalism contributes to the decline of the Zhou dynasty

350 BC The earliest description of a pulley appears in a Greek text

350 BC Tea, now well established as a drink, features in a Chinese dictionary

350 BC Private financiers in Athens give , take deposits, change money from one currency to another and arrange credit for travellers

350 BC Daoism, attributed to the mythical sage Lao Tzu, becomes a popular alternative to the solemnity of Confucianism

350 BC Eudoxus of Cnidus proposes the concept of transparent spheres supporting the bodies visible in the heavens

350 BC Artemisia, widow of Mausolus, builds him a tomb at Halicarnassus so spectacular that his name provides a new word - mausoleum

356 BC Alexander the Great is born in Pella, the capital of his father Philip II, at the heart of the expanding Macedonian kingdom

356 BC Philip II sets about making Macedon the most powerful state in Greece

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359 BC Philip II succeds his father Amyntas III on the throne of Macedonia, the northernmost kingdom of Greece

367 BC Aristotle, at the age of seventeen, comes to Athens to join Plato's academy

371 BC A Spartan army is overwhelmed at Leuctra by a smaller number of Thebans under Epaminondas

380 BC A Greek text, attributed to Polybus, argues that the human body is composed of four humours

380 BC Central to Plato's philosophy is the theory that there are higher Forms of reality, of which our senses perceive only a transient shadow

387 BC Plato establishes a school in Akademeia, a suburb of Athens

390 BC Celtic tribes , pushing south through the Alps, reach Rome and sack the city

396 BC The Romans capture the nearby Etruscan town of Veii, beginning a long process of territorial expansion

399 BC Socrates, convicted in Athens of impiety, is sentenced to death and drinks the hemlock

400 BC The kingdom of Magadha, with its capital at Rajgir (near modern Patna), emerges as the dominant power in north India

400 BC Daodejing ('The Way and the Power') is the book of Daoism

400 BC The Zapotecs create a great city at Monte Alban, continuing the Olmec culture

400 BC The Upanishads, written over a long period from oral tradition, are the mystical texts of early Hinduism

400 BC Hippocrates, on the Greek island of Kos, founds an influential school of medicine

401 BC Greek mercenaries, on the losing side at Cunaxa, begin a long journey home - described by Xenophon in the Anabasis

404 BC The famous Long Walls of Athens, her impregnable defence, are dismantled by the Spartans in the final act of the Peloponnesian War

405 BC The last remaining Athenian fleet is surprised and destroyed by the Spartans in the Hellespont

409 BC A Carthaginian army lands near Marsala to begin the long involvement of Carthage in Sicily

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410 BC The Greeks develop the three classical styles of column, the Doric, the Ionic and the Corinthian

414 BC The Persians, renewing their interest in the Aegean, fund the Spartans in the building of a fleet to match that of Athens

416 BC The Athenians, capturing Melos, kill all the males of the island and sell the women and children into slavery

420 BC Buddha introduces a vigorous tradition of monasticism, in the order of Buddhist monks known as Sangha

420 BC The Greek philosopher Democritus declares that matter is composed of indivisible and indestructible atoms

424 BC Gautama, after a night of meditation under a pipal tree at Buddh Gaya, is 'enlightened' and becomes the Buddha

424 BC preaches his first sermon, at Sarnath, setting out the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path

425 BC Aristophanes wins first prize in Athens for his comedy The Acharnians

427 BC Athenians vote to kill all the men on the captured island of Mytilene, but the next day change their mind - almost too late

429 BC Pericles dies in Athens of the plague

430 BC A plague strikes Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian War

430 BC Phidias creates a massive statue of Zeus, covered in gold and ivory, to stand in the temple at Olympia

430 BC Siddartha Gautama, a prince in Nepal, leaves home to become a wandering ascetic

431 BC The renewal of the Peloponnesian War prompts Thucydides to begin a great work of contemporary history

431 BC A sudden attack on Plataea (an ally of Athens) by Thebes (an ally of Sparta) begins the Second Peloponnesian War

433 BC Sparta demands withdrawal of the Athenian ships from the Peloponnesian coast, but Pericles will offer only independent arbitration

433 BC Pericles breaches his own Thirty Years Treaty, sending 30 triremes in support

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of a city state in dispute with Corinth, an ally of Sparta

423 BC Socrates is now sufficiently prominent to be satirized in Clouds, a comedy by Aristophanes

440 BC An extensive trading network, backed up by force, gives Athens control over the whole of the Aegean and the Black Sea

440 BC Under Pericles, colonies and garrisons are established in strategic areas with the colonists remaining Athenian citizens

440 BC Myron sculpts the Discus Thrower, an outstanding example of the Greek ability to suggest movement

443-429 BC Pericles is selected by the assembly as the leading general of Athens, a post to which he is re-appointed every year until his death

446 BC Pericles negotiates a treaty, scheduled to hold for thirty years, establishing spheres of influence for Sparta (the mainland) and Athens (the Aegean coast and islands)

446 BC An army commanded by a Spartan king turns back mysteriously during an invasion of Attica, leading to rumours that Pericles has bribed the king

446 BC Phidias sculpts a huge statue of the goddess Athena, to be the central feature of the new Parthenon

447 BC Ictinos, the architect of the Parthenon, blends Doric and Ionic elements in a way which will later influence many other Greek temples

447 BC The Athenians begin building the Parthenon, a temple to Athena, which they complete within ten years

448 BC In the Peace of Kallias the Persians acknowledge the independence of Greek Ionia, and agree not to bring their fleet into the Aegean

450 BC Pericles introduces payment in Athens for jury service so that no citizen is excluded by poverty

450 BC The Greek historian Herodotus visits Egypt and provides, among many other details, an account of the process of mummification

450 BC The Sophists, professional philosophers, travel round Greece educating the sons of the rich

450 BC The Athenians mount successful attacks on the Persian forces occupying the Greek island of Cyprus

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450 BC The followers of Pythagoras maintain that the earth revolves on its own axis and moves in an orbit

450 BC The earliest known example of Arabic writing is on an inscribed column at Tema, in northwest Arabia

450 BC Empedocles states that all matter is made up of four elemental substances - earth, fire, air and water

454 BC Pericles' power is greatly increased when he is put in charge of the funds of the Delian leaague

454 BC The Athenians transfer into their own keeping the accumulated treasure of the Delian League

454 BC The Greeks suffer a major reverse when their fleet is trapped on the Nile and destroyed by the Persians

454 BC Euripides enters the drama contest at the City Dionysia in Athens for the first time 457 BC Athens completes its famous Long Walls, providing protected access between the city and its harbour, at Piraeus

460 BC Forces of the Delian League assist the Egyptians in a successful revolt against their Persian rulers

460 BC Simmering hostilities between the allies of Sparta and Athens develop into endemic conflict among the Greek city states of the Peloponnese

460 BC Herodotus, the 'father of history', writes his account of the Greco-Persian Wars from a vantage point in Asia Minor

461 BC Pericles is given the task of constructing Athens' two famous Long Walls, stretching from the city to either side of the harbour at Piraeus

461 BC Athens makes provocative alliances with two city-states opposed to Sparta

462 BC Sparta causes offence in Athens by dismissing the Athenian army without using them against the helots

462 BC With the army away, Pericles introduces full democracy for all Athenian citizens, enabling them to vote and participate in the administration of the state

463 BC Sparta appeals to its allies for help against the helots, and Athens - against the wishes of Pericles and his group - sends an army

464 BC An earthquake in Sparta leads to an uprising by the helots, who take up a

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defensive position on Mount Ithome

465 BC Pericles is one of a radical group in Athens, eager to curb the reactionaries controlling the Areopagus, and hostile to Sparta

466 BC The Athenian general Cimon wins a spectacular victory over the Persians at the mouth of the Eurymedon River, in southwest Turkey

468 BC Sophocles wins the prize for tragedy in Athens, defeating Aeschylus in the competition

470 BC Vardhamana, an Indian prince, leaves home to live as a beggar - at the start of the Jain religion

472 BC The Olympic games are extended to five days, the first and last of which are taken up with religious ceremonies

477 BC A life-size bronze of a racing chariot, with its driver and horses, is presented to Delphi to commemorate a victory in the games

478 BC The Delian League is formed for mutual defence, but also to liberate the Greek cities of Ionia from Persian rule

478 BC Representatives of Athens and other Aegean city-states meet in Delos to form a coalition, later known as the Delian League

478 BC In the last joint campaign by Sparta and Athens the strategically important city of Byzantium is liberated from Persian rule

479 BC An Athenian force destroys at Mykale the remainder of the Persian fleet, ending the threat from them at sea

479 BC A Spartan army, led by Pausanias, wins a victory at Plataea, completing the rout of the Persians on the Greek mainland

480 BC The Athenian fleet defeats a considerably larger Persian force in the narrow strait between Salamis and the mainland

480 BC Athens, abandoned to the advancing Persians, is looted and destroyed

480 BC 300 Spartans, led by Leonidas, die attempting to hold the pass of Thermopylae against the advancing Persian army

480 BC Kritios sculpts a naturalistic male nude, now the earliest surviving masterpiece in a central tradition of Greek art

481 BC The Greek city-states meet in Corinth to devise a joint strategy against the Persians

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481 BC Xerxes I, renewing the campaign of his father Darius against the Greeks, leads a large army round the Aegean and through Thrace

483 BC Themistocles persuades the Athenians to build up their fleet against the expected renewal of the threat from Persia

484 BC Aeschylus wins the prize for tragedy at the City Dionysia in Athens

487 BC Ostracism is introduced in Athens as a way of getting rid of unpopular politicians

490 BC The Persian fleet moves south towards Athens, but then heads home across the Aegean without attempting an assault on the city

490 BC At Marathon the Athenian hoplites, heavily outnumbered, win a spectacular victory against the Persians – of whom the survivors escape in their ships

490 BC Pheidippides, given the task of running from Athens to Sparta to request help at Marathon against the Persians, completes the journey in two days

490 BC The Persian fleet secures the Greek island of Euboea before making the short crossing to Marathon on the mainland – where they await the Greeks

490 BC Darius sends a fleet across the Aegean, carrying a large army of infantry and cavalry for an attack on Athens

493 BC After six years the Persians recover control of Ionia, but Athens is now identified as a target for invasion

495 BC Pericles is born in Attica, the son of distinguished parents and the great- nephew of Cleisthenes

499 BC The Greek cities of Ionia rebel against Persian rule, with the partial support of Athens

500 BC The Greeks add a third bank of oars to their war galleys, turning the bireme into a trireme

500 BC Hockey, like polo, is a team game in the Persian empire

500 BC The followers of Pythagoras discover the mathematical basis of the octave

500 BC Nok terracotta figures, found in modern Nigeria, stand at the beginning of the rich tradition of African sculpture

500 BC The Chinese philosophy of alternating opposites is expressed as yin and yang

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500 BC The Celts, moving west from central Europe, settle in France and northern Spain

500 BC Parmenides is the first pure philosopher, using logic as a philosophical tool in his poem Nature

500 BC The Lapps, hunters of reindeer, have Scandinavia to themselves before the arrival of Germanic tribes

500 BC The new and more sophisticated fashion in Greek vases is the red-figure style

500 BC The Magi, possibly converting from an earlier Iranian religion, become the priests of Zoroastrianism

500 BC Darius I adopts Zoroastrianism as the religion of the Persian empire

500 BC The Greeks observe the strange effect of electricity, seen when amber (known to them as electron) is rubbed

500 BC The Chinese I Jing, or 'Classic of Changes', is compiled as a book of divination

500 BC The Isthmian games at Corinth are by now a regular event, as are the Pythian games and the Nemean games

500 BC The great network of roads built by Darius I has at its centre the 2000-mile royal road from Susa to Sardis

500 BC The secret of lacquer, the sap of a tree which can be hardened by moisture, is discovered in China

500 BC The Greeks are intrigued by the iron-attracting property of a mineral which they find in the district of Magnesia

500 BC The 10,000 elite troops of the Persian empire, known as the Immortals, demonstrate the power of a professional standing army

500 BC The rulers of Aksum, the first Ethiopian kingdom, claim descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba

500 BC A Persian rug, woven with a knotted pile, is placed in the tomb of a Scythian chieftain and survives to this day

508 BC Cleisthenes gives every Athenian citizen a voice in the demos, the local council at village or town level

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510 BC The Roman senate becomes an executive body with two of its members elected annually as consuls, or joint heads of state

510 BC The Roman senate becomes an executive body with two of its members elected annually as consuls, or joint heads of state

510 BC According to legend, the Etruscans are driven from Rome by popular outrage after the rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius

510 BC Hecateus, a geographer in Miletus, produces a map showing the Greek idea of the known world

510 BC The Athenian ruler Hippias is toppled by the nobles of Attica, with the help of Sparta

513 BC The Chinese become the first people to cast iron, after developing a furnace which can reach a very high temperature

515 BC The Persian emperor Darius I constructs a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea

518 BC Darius starts to build a spectacular new palace and capital at Persepolis

522 BC Darius I wins the Persian throne and ushers in the heyday of the Achaemenid empire

525 BC The Persians defeat an Egyptian army at Pelusium and then capture Memphis

527 BC The Athenian ruler Peisistratos dies and is peacefully succeeded by his son, Hippias

528 BC The Phoenician cities, liberated from Babylonian rule, willingly accept inclusion in the Persian empire

529 BC The Greek mathematician Pythagoras establishes himself, along with his followers, in southern Italy

530 BC The Greek colonists of Paestum, in southern Italy, build the first of their three superb temples

530 BC Cyrus the Great is buried in an austerely impressive tomb at Pasagardae, in Persia

534 BC Thespis, traditionally considered the first actor, wins the drama competition in Athens

539 BC Returning to Jerusalem, the Jews begin to rebuild the Temple

539 BC A Persian army captures Babylon and brings it into the empire of Cyrus the

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Great

545 BC Cyrus annexes the Greek territory of Ionia as part of his empire, giving Persia a presence on the Aegean

546 BC Sardis, the capital city of the Lydian ruler Croesus, is taken by the Persians

550 BC The Greek city states pioneer the use of citizen armies, made up of free men who bring their own fighting equipment

550 BC Aramaic, a Semitic language from Syria, becomes the lingua franca of the Middle East

550 BC Larache is founded as a Carthaginian colony on the Atlantic coast of Africa

550 BC K'ung-fu-tzu, or Confucius, teaches a practical philosophy which will profoundly influence Chinese history

550 BC The phalanx, though not originally devised in Greece, is a devastating formation on the battlefield when composed of hoplites

550 BC The hoplite - a Greek citizen, heavily armed in bronze and leather - proves a formidable fighting man

550 BC Indian medical theory maintains that the body consists of three humours - spirit, phlegm and bile

550 BC An Etruscan dynasty rules in Rome and Etruscan influence is now dominant throughout central Italy

550 BC Polo originates in the Persian empire, probably as part of the training of the imperial cavalry

550 BC The murals of Etruscan tombs, such as the Tomb of the Lionesses in Tarquinia, give a lively glimpse of an earlier tradition in Greek art

550 BC Croesus builds a spectacular temple at Ephesus in honour of Artemis, or Diana

550 BC The city-states of the Peloponnese unite in a defensive league under Spartan leadership

550 BC Cyrus, king of the Persians, takes Ecbatana, capital city of the Medes, and establishes the first Persian empire

550 BC The Indian physician Susruta pioneers plastic surgery of the nose

550 BC The Greeks develop the Babylonian theme of the zodiac, naming it the zodiakos kyklos or circle of animals

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550 BC The optimistic concept of the Messiah is part of the Jewish response to captivity in Babylon

550 BC The Sinhalese, after moving south through India, cross into Sri Lanka

550 BC The painters of Greek vases develop the black-figure style, with the scene depicted in black silhouette against a red ground

560 BC Peisistratos seizes power in Athens and rules as a benevolent dictator for more than thirty years

570 BC Anaximander, a pupil of Thales, develops bold theories about the formation of the earth and the beginning of life

580 BC The Iranian prophet Zoroaster teaches that there is one god, Ahura Mazda

580 BC The synagogue, as a simple place of Jewish worship, develops during the Babylonian captivity

580 BC Nebuchadnezzar builds the hanging gardens of Babylon, supposedly to comfort a homesick wife

585 BC The Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II begins a siege of Tyre which lasts for thirteen years before the city capitulates

585 BC Thales of Miletus, traditionally the first philosopher, is credited with the prediction of a solar eclipse

586 BC The Jews, taken into captivity in Babylon, form the first community of the Diaspora

586 BC After a long siege Jerusalem is taken by Nebuchadnezzar and the city, including Solomon's Temple, is destroyed

594 BC Solon makes every Athenian citizen a member of the ecclesia, responsible for the election of archons, thus laying the first cornerstone of Athenian democracy

594 BC Solon is elected archon in Athens, immediately cancelling the debts of the peasants of Attica and making it illegal to enslave a debtor

600 BC The free smallholding peasants of Attica fall increasingly into debt, compelled to pay a sixth of all their produce to a creditor

600 BC Hindu hermits live in groups described as ashramas

600 BC The poems of the Shi Jing, China's earliest work of literature, are gathered

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together

600 BC The swirling decorative lines of Celtic metalwork at Hallstatt begin a tradition which lives on in illuminated manuscripts and stone Celtic crosses

600 BC Phoenicians sail round the Cape of Good Hope and bring back the surprising news that the sun was seen to the north of them

600 BC Isis, who is able to restore her husband Osiris after he has been chopped into pieces, becomes one of the most popular deities in Egypt

600 BC Frenzied dances, in honour of the god Dionysus, become part of Greek theatre - deriving probably from the northeast, in Thrace

600 BC An Olmec sculptor creates the piece known today as the Wrestler

600 BC The choros, originally danced in a circle by temple virgins, is the centrepiece of the developing Greek theatre

605 BC Nebuchadnezzar comes to the throne of Babylon, beginning a prosperous reign of more than forty years

612 BC The Babylonians defeat an Egyptian army at Carchemish, but do not press on into Egypt

612 BC The Medes and the Babylonians destroy Nineveh and bring to an end the power of Assyria

625 BC Hereditary aristocrats hold nearly all political power and own most of the land in Attica

630 BC The Areopagus, named from the hill on Athens where it meets, is the council through which the nobles keep power in their own hands

645 BC Ashurbanipal commissions a magnificent relief of a lion hunt for his new palace at Nineveh

650 BC The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is known in its complete form from texts in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh

650 BC The inhabitants of Messenia revolt against Spartan rule and are reduced, in retaliation, to the status of serfs or helots

650 BC The earliest known coins are minted in Ephesus, bean-shaped and struck on one side with a distinguishing mark

650 BC The capitals of Greek pillars are by now in the two basic patterns of Doric and Ionic

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650 BC Ashurbanipal commissions a great library of cuneiform clay tablets at Nineveh

650 BC The Greek city states make a habit of consulting the oracle at Delphi, hoping mainly for reassurance

663 BC The Egyptian city of Memphis falls to an Assyrian army, soon to be followed by Thebes

667 BC Byzantium (the future Constantinople) is founded as a colony of Megara, a Greek city-state

688 BC Boxing is included in the Olympic games, with each bout going on until one fighter gives up

689 BC The Assyrian king, Sennacherib, destroys with great brutality the city of Babylon

700 BC The island of Sicily is colonized from the eastern Mediterranean by both Phoenicians and Greeks

700 BC Sennacherib moves the Assyrian capital to a new site at Nineveh

700 BC Judah and Benjamin, together forming the kingdom of Judah, are the only two surviving tribes of Israel

700 BC Egyptian scribes develop an abbreviated version of hieroglyphs for everyday use, in the script known as demotic ('for the people')

700 BC The Greeks make the Phoenician alphabet much more flexible by the addition of vowels, from alpha to omega

704 BC Wrestling is included in the Olympic games, followed by a terrifying form of all- in wrestling from 652 BC

710 BC The first known lock and key is fitted in the new palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad, in Assyria

719 BC The king of Cush, or Nubia, conquers down the Nile to the sea, establishing the Cushite dynasty

722 BC The Assyrians overwhelm the north of Israel and the ten northern tribes vanish from history - the majority of them probably dispersed or sold into slavery

750 BC The inhabitants of Sparta organize their society on military lines and consider themselves the descendants of the Dorians

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750 BC The Homeric texts, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are written down - probably in Ionia

750 BC The Etruscans establish Italy's first civilization, in the region between the Arno and the Tiber

750 BC Ionia emerges as a political entity, forming a league of twelve Greek cities in Asia Minor

753 BC This year is later selected by Roman scholars as the date of the founding of Rome, becoming the first year (AUC 1) in Roman chronology

771 BC The Zhou rulers, driven east from Xi'an, create a new capital at Loyang and establish the Eastern Zhou dynasty

776 BC The traditional date for the first athletic contest at Olympia

800 BC The earliest surviving sundial is in use in Egypt

800 BC The Assyrian army makes good use of the new technology by which iron can be hardened into steel suitable for weapons

814 BC The traditional date of the founding of Carthage (supposedly by the mythical queen Dido, but in practice by Phoenicians)

850 BC The technique of glazing pottery is discovered in Mesopotamia, though used at this stage only for decorative purposes

850 BC The Assyrians develop the battering ram into a mobile and powerful siege engine

850 BC Citium, in Cyprus, is the first of many Phoenician colonies in the Mediterranean

853 BC Gindibu brings 1000 Arab warriors on camels to do battle at Karkar (the first known reference to Arabs as a distinct group)

868 BC Ashburbanipal II extracts tribute from the cities of Phoenicia, beginning a period of Assyrian domination of the region

870 BC An annual event in Assyria is the departure of the army in spring for an expedition of ruthless and brutal conquest

870 BC Ashurnasirpal II creates a spectacular new capital at Nimrud (and claims to have had 69,574 guests at his palace-warming party)

883859 BC Assyria, during the reign of Ashurnasirpal II, once again recovers an extensive empire

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900 BC La Venta replaces San Lorenzo as the capital city and cultural centre of the Olmecs

900 BC With the encouragements of Athens, non-Dorian Greeeks migrate to form colonies on the west coast of Anatolia

900 BC Chávin de Huántar becomes the centre of the first civilization of south America

910 BC Solomon's son Rehoboam is unable to prevent the ten northern tribes going their own way, under the leadership of Jeroboam

950 BC Wood from the famous cedars of Lebanon is only one of the many luxury goods traded by the Phoenicians

950 BC Libyans in the Egyptian army take control of the nation and rule as pharaohs

950 BC The Queen of Sheba, who visits Solomon in Jerusalem, is legendary - but her kingdom of Saba is a historical reality

960 BC Solomon, the king of Israel, builds the first Temple in Jerusalem

965 BC Solomon becomes king of Israel and presides over a period of peace and prosperity

970 BC Hiram, the Phoenician king of Tyre, is an enthusiastic trading partner of King David in Jerusalem, and later of Solomon

990 BC David captures Jerusalem, which he makes his capital - bringing here the ark of the covenant

990 BC David, already king of Judah and now anointed king of Israel, brings in one realm the twelve tribes of the Israelites

1000 BC Burial mounds feature in the Ohio valley, built first in the Adena culture and then by Hopewell tribes

1000 BC Iron reheated with carbon is found to be much harder, being transformed into steel

1000 BC The Olmecs raise large clay platforms, probably with temples at the top, beginning the long American tradition of sacred pyramids

1000 BC Tyre and Sidon have by now replaced Byblos as the dominant cities within Phoenicia

1000 BC The nomadic fighters of the steppes, nimble on horseback and shooting arrows

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as they go, pioneer the techniques of cavalry warfare

1000 BC Massive stone heads carved by the Olmecs provide a dramatic beginning to the story of American sculpture

1000 BC The Israelites are defeated by the Philistines on Mount Gilboa, with Saul and three of his sons dying during or after the battle

1000 BC By now the mammoth, the giant bison and the horse are all extinct in America, partly because of the warming climate and partly because of the success of humans with spears

1000 BC The abacus is used as an everyday method of calculation by Phoenicians and Babylonians

1000 BC The Israelites, settled in Canaan, become the first people in history to decide that their god is the only god

1000 BC Petra acquires importance and wealth from its position on caravan routes from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean

1000 BC The Jews write down the Torah, the earliest part of the text subsequently known to Christians as the Old Testament

1020 BC Saul, anointed king of Israel by Samuel, establishes himself at Gibeah, just north of Jerusalem

1050 BC The Zhou defeat the Shang, and establish a new dynasty with a capital at Ch'ang-an (now Xi'an)

1050 BC Samson is one of many Hebrew chieftains fighting the Philistines for possession of Canaan

1100 BC Athens, not reached by the invading Dorians, becomes a surviving outpost of Mycenaean civilization

1100 BC Phoenician sailors use the pole star for navigational purposes

1100 BC The Phoenicians develop the war galley, with a sharp battering ram in the bow

1150 BC Mycenae and other states of the Peloponnese are overwhelmed by invading Dorian Greeks

1200 BC Stone tablets, engraved by Moses to signify God's covenant with his people, are placed in a sacred chest - the ark of the covenant

1200 BC The Philistines settle in the region which, as Palestine, will become known by their name

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1200 BC San Lorenzo develops as the first centre of America's earliest civilization, that of the Olmecs

1200 BC Mysterious raiders from the sea cause chaos throughout the eastern Mediterranean, from Greece to Palestine and Egypt

1250 BC Ramses II creates a spectacular temple in his own honour at Abu Simbel

1250 BC The god of the Hebrews, announcing to Moses 'I Am Who I Am', acquires his name - YHWH, meaning 'He Who Is'

1250 BC Not for the first time, the city of Troy is destroyed - on this occasion probably by Mycenaean Greeks

1250 BC Moses is with the Hebrew tribes in Sinai, after the exodus from Egypt

1275 BC An indecisve battle between the Hittites and the Egyptians, at Kadesh, stabilizes the frontier between the two empires

1279 BC Ramses II, perhaps the greatest of Egypt's pharaohs, begins a reign of sixty-six years

1300 BC Mycenaean merchants trade as far west as Spain and have links with neolithic societies far away in the interior of Europe

1200 BC Palaces in Mycenae are destroyed, probably by the so-called Sea Peoples from the west and south coasts of Turkey

1300 BC Seafarers reach and colonize Fiji, lying between Melanesia and Polynesia

1300 BC The earliest known suit of armour, made of bronze, survives from a tomb in Mycenaean Greece

1300 BC Mycenae prevails as the dominant power throughout the Peloponnese and the entire Aegean

1300 BC Chinese priests record on oracle bones the result of their divination, thus providing the earliest examples of Chinese characters

1324 BC The young Egyptian pharaoh, Tutankhamun, dies and is buried in a suitable tomb

1333 BC With the return to favour of the god Amen, the young Tutankhaten's name is changed to Tutankhamun

1340 BC One of the regular sitters to the court sculptor Thutmose is the pharaoh's wife, Nefertiti

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1345 BC The Amarna tablets contain extensive correspondence between the Akhenaten government in Egypt and subject princes in Phoenicia

1345 BC The Amarna letters, an invaluable collection of cuneiform tablets, are written at the court of the pharaoh Akhenaten

1350 BC The pharaoh Akhenaten creates a new capital city on the Nile at Tell el Amarna

1353 BC The Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV adopts a new deity, Aten, and changes his name to Akhenaten

1380 BC The pharaoh Amenhotep III commissions the great temple to Amen-Re at Luxor

1400 BC All the separate regions of Mesopotamia are by now ruled by aristocracies of warriors fighting from light chariots

1400 BC China produces superb bronzes, in the ritual vessels for sacrifices to the ancestors

1400 BC Ancestor worship, a central theme of Chinese history, is practised by the royal family and high nobility in Shang times

1400 BC Chopsticks are in use in China, with bronze versions featuring in Shang tombs

1400 BC The Great City Shang, on a site later known as An-yang, develops as the capital of China's first dynasty

1400 BC The clepsydra, or water clock, is developed in Egypt

1400 BC Wine features prominently in the Mycenaean society of this time, as remembered and depicted in Homer

1400 BC The so-called Treasury of Atreus, at Mycenae, is the most spectacular of the beehive tombs of this period

1400 BC The massive architecture of Mycenaean cities such as Tiryns is said in Greek legend to have been built by one-eyed giants, the Cyclopes

1425 BC All the towns and palaces of Crete, except Knossos itself, are destroyed by fire - probably by invaders from Mycenae

1450 BC Rich Egyptian households have the latest luxury items, small bottles of coloured glass to hold cosmetics

1469 BC The Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III defeats his enemies at Megiddo, in history's first fully described battle and siege

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1490 BC Hatshepsut takes power in Egypt, and is unusual in being a female pharaoh

1500 BC Sacrificial hymns of the Aryans, gathered in the Rigveda, become the earliest Sanskrit literature

1500 BC The Aryans bring into India the roots of Hinduism, with the Brahmans as a priestly caste

1500 BC The Hittites, in Anatolia, are the first people to work iron - introducing what is later called the Iron Age

1500 BC The first steps towards a phonetic alphabet are taken in Phoenicia

1500 BC The composite bow, accurate to 200 yards, is used by warriors in Asia fighting from chariots and on horseback

1500 BC The Chinese develop a form of scroll, made of strips of bamboo threaded together and rolled up like a wooden blind

1500 BC The camel, in both its single-humped and double-humped varieties, is domesticated in north Africa and Asia

1500 BC Texts written at Mycenae, in the script known as Linear B, are the earliest surviving version of Greek

1500 BC The gods Amen and Re are merged at Thebes as Amen-Re, the most important deity in the Egyptian pantheon

1500 BC Indo-European tribes, speaking Baltic languages, settle in the regions of modern Lithuania and Latvia

1500 BC Indo-European tribes, known collectively as Aryans, enter India from the northwest

1500 BC to 1500 AD On the grass plains of north America humans gradually hunt to extinction several American species, including the camel, mammoth and horse

1500 BC The temples of Karnak and Luxor, in ancient Thebes, introduce the massive stone architecture of column and lintel

1500 BC The Slavs settle in the regions of eastern Europe and western Russia

1500 BC The Jews adopt a long-established Egyptian ritual - the circumcision of boys

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1500 BC A copper trumpet is in use in Egypt, forerunner of the brass instruments of the orchestra

1500 BC The Maya are believed to have lived in the same region from about 1500 BC to the present day - America's longest example of continuity

1520 BC Thutmose I extends Egyptian control as far up the Nile as Abu Hamad

1525 BC The eruption of a volcano, on the island of Thera, entombs and preserves houses with frescoes in the Minoan city of Akrotiri

1531 BC Babylon is destroyed by the Hittites, invaders from Anatolia, but re-establishes itself in subsequent centuries

1540 BC The god Osiris, in his tall white headdress, represents in Egyptian tombs the idea of resurrection in the next world

1540 BC The New Kingdom begins in Egypt, bringing the most spectacular of all the dynasties

1550 BC Egyptian tombs include paintings of a kind to help the occupants in the next world, whether in the Book of the Dead or on the walls

1600 BC The characters written in Chinese documents of the Shang dynasty are directly related to those still in use today

1600 BC A bull-fighting fresco in the palace of Knossos is linked with the island's cult of the bull

1630 BC The Hyksos, arriving from the middle east, win control of Egypt and rule for a century

1700 BC Ashur, or Assyria, sinks into almost a millennium of fluctuating but largely diminished fortunes

1700 BC More than 25,000 cuneiform tablets (unearthed since 1933 at Mari) provide a detailed account of Assyria in the late 18th century BC

1700 BC Hammurabi destroys Mari (concealing for posterity an extraordinary cuneiform archive not discovered until 1933)

1700 BC The Hittites build an empire based on their stronghold at Hattusa (now Bogazkale) in Anatolia

1700 BC Hammurabi, in the process of winning control over the whole of Mesopotamia, conquers the northern territories of Mari and Ashur

1700 BC The biblical account suggests that around this period the Hebrews are a

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captive tribe in Egypt

1720 BC The Code of Hammurabi is the first surviving document to record the law relating to slaves

1720 BC The Code of Hammurabi gives a detailed picture of Babylonian law and society

1728 BC Hammurabi begins a programme of conquest and coalition which will vastly extend the Babylonian empire

1728 BC Hammurabi inherits the relatively minor kingdom of Babylon

1740 BC Shamshi-Adad I conquers the rich and ancient kingdom of Mari, and puts on the throne his son Yasmah-Adad

1750 BC The Babylonians introduce an important step in the story of arithmetic - the concept of place value in numbers

1750 BC Priests in Babylon make loans from the temple treasure, introducing the concept of banking from 1750 BC Over many centuries Indo-European tribes (Greeks, Germans, Balts, Italics, Celts) move into new territories throughout western Europe

1750 BC Zimri-Lim builds himself a spectacular palace with some 300 rooms in his capital city of Mari in northern Mesopotamia

1750 BC Babylonian astronomers name many of the constellations and identify the planets

1750 BC A mathematical papyrus, copied out by Ahmes, an Egyptian scribe, offers some of the world's first exam questions

1750 BC Shamshi-Adad I conquers Ashur and the surrounding areas, beginning Assyria's first brief period as a regional power

1800 BC In Mesopotamia the new weapon is a light chariot, drawn by two horses

1800 BC Abraham leaves Ur and moves with his tribe and flocks towards Canaan

1830 BC Babylon is a tiny region, about 50 miles across, when Amorites establish there the first Babylonian dynasty

1850 BC Wrestlers are painted on the walls of an Egyptian tomb, performing most of the holds and falls still in use today

2000 BC The Beaker people arrive in Britain, bringing several desirable commodities - including horses, alcohol and bronze

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2000 BC Administrative records and accounts at Knossos are kept in a script, as yet undeciphered, known as Linear A

2000 BC The red jungle fowl is domesticated as poultry in southeast Asia

2000 BC The centre of power in Egypt moves to the interior, with the capital at Thebes rather than Memphis

2000 BC The elephant is tamed in the Indus civilization

2000 BC Rice is by now grown in the Indus Valley civilization, in the region of Lothal in modern Pakistan, and in parts of China and Korea

2000 BC The cemetery at Los Millares in Spain contains more than 100 beehive tombs

2000 BC Medicine men in Peru practise trephination, cuttting holes in the skulls of brave or foolhardy patients

2000 BC Africa south of the equatorial forests is largely inhabited by the Khoisan, of whom the San and the Hottentots are the modern survivors

2000 BC The god Ashur is worshipped at a shrine on the Tigris known by his name (the origin of the word Assyria)

2000 BC Trade is carried on from Crete round the Mediterranean as far west as Sicily and in the east down to Egypt

2000 BC The water buffalo, domesticated somewhere in southeast Asia, features on the seals of the Indus civilization

2000 BC Knossos, and other such palaces, are built for dynasties in Minoan Crete

2000 BC Bantu-speaking tribes begin to spread through Africa, from their original homelands south of the Sahara

2000 BC Mentuhotep II wins control of all Egypt, establishing the period known as the Middle Kingdom

2200 BC A ring of large standing stones is raised in England at , now a village in Wiltshire

2350 BC Sargon conquers the other Mesopotamian states and establishes a dynasty with a new capital at Akkad, close to modern Baghdad

2400 BC The rich trading city of Mari, on the Euphrates, is an important centre in northern Mesopotamia

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2400 BC Clay tablets discovered at Ebla reveal a busy trading economy reinforced by aggressive military policies

2500 BC To ensure continued comfort in the afterlife, rich Egyptians have models placed in their tombs of the necessary servants and utensils

2500 BC It is not known when cats are first domesticated, but from the start of Egyptian civilization they are sacred animals in temples

2500 BC To preserve bodies in perpetuity, the Egyptian ruling class develops the elaborate and lengthy process of mummifying an eviscerated corpse

2500 BC At Stonehenge, constructed and altered over many centuries, the largest stones are put in place

2500 BC The ruling family of Ur plays a board game which appears to be the same as modern backgammon

2500 BC The largest sculpture of the ancient world, a sphinx with the face of the pharaoh Khufu, is carved in situ at Giza

2500 BC Trade lnks, probably by sea in Phoenician ships from Byblos, are established between Egypt and Phoenicia

2500 BC The first and largest of the three great pyramids at Giza is built for the pharaoh Khufu, later known to the Greeks as Cheops

2500 BC The delicate seals of the Indus civilization are in a script as yet undeciphered

2500 BC At Huaca Prieta, the earliest known farming community in South America, squash, gourds and chili are cultivated

2580 BC Egypt enters the period known as the Old Kingdom, its first era of monumental architecture

2600 BC The Canaanites establish themselves in the region around what is now Jerusalem

2620 BC Imhotep creates the first pyramid - the 'step pyramid' at Saqqara - as a tomb for the pharaoh Djoser

2781 BC Sirius rises in this year on the first day of the first Egyptian month - a rare event which possibly launches the Egyptian calendar system

2800 BC Byblos (modern Jbeil) evolves to become the most important seaport and city of Phoenicia

2800 BC The harp and the lyre are in use as musical instruments in Mesopotamia

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2800 BC Objects are cast in bronze, at Ur in Mesopotamia - introducing what is later called the Bronze Age

2850 BC The Chinese discover that the cocoon of a certain worm can be unwound, spun as thread and then woven - thus creating silk

3000 BC The world's earliest known board game, senet, is played in Egypt

3000 BC The earliest known currency, consisting of gold bars, is in use in Egypt and Mesopotamia

3000 BC The ass, until now roaming wild from north east Africa to Mesopotamia, is domesticated in Egypt

3000 BC The language of a single tribe in eastern Europe, as recently as 3000 BC, is the ancestor of all modern Indo-European languages

3000 BC Semitic tribes move up from the Arabian peninsula, through Sinai into Palestine and Syria

3000 BC The people known as Phoenicians are in the region of modern Lebanon from around this date

3000 BC Potters in Mesopotamia turn their pots on wheels

3000 BC Oxen are given the heavy work of pulling the plough, previously done by men

3000 BC On the steppes of central Asia tribesmen tame, breed and eventually ride horses

3000 BC Complex societies, with sophisticated temple architecture, develop at sites such as Aspero and Caral in the Norte Chico region of Peru

3000 BC Slavery arrives as part of the package of civilisation, along with armies, public works and social hierarchies

3000 BC Wheels are in use on carts, particularly where wood is easily available and the ground rough - as in the forests of Europe

3000 BC The sculptors of the Cyclades produce stylized and formal figures, mainly female, in white marble

3000 BC The llama and the alpaca, two south American members of the camel family, are domesticated

3000 BC The lever is in use in both Mesopotamia and Egypt

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3000 BC An easily portable writing surface is developed, from the papyrus plant of the Nile

3100 BC The pharaoh Narmer celebrates a victory with a sculpted relief showing his personal dominance over the enemy

3100 BC The invention of writing marks the transition, in academic terms, from to history

3100 BC The Egyptian hieroglyphic script develops at much the same time as the Sumerian cuneiform

3100 BC Writing is developed, at Sumer, as cuneiform script on clay tablets

3100 BC The Egyptians paint murals on the walls of tombs, designed to help the occupants in the next world

3100 BC Upper and Lower Egypt are unified into a single kingdom, inaugurating the first Egyptian dynasty

3100 BC Sumer develops as the first centre of Mesopotamian civilization

3250 BC A neolithic herdsman dies high in the Alps - and is perfectly preserved in ice

3500 BC Olives are cultivated in Crete and will provide, in the form of olive oil, one of the main staples of Mediterranean trade

3761 BC Later selected by Hebrew scholars as the date when the world began, this becomes the first year (AM 1) in Jewish chronology

3800 BC Copper is extracted from ore by smelting at various sites in Iran

4000 BC Grapes are cultivated in the region of the Caspian see, where the grape vine Vitis vinifera is indigenous

4000 BC A beautiful pestle in the shape of a bird is made in Papua New Guinea, clearly more for ceremonial occasions rather than everyday use

4000 BC Taro, probably the earliest plant cultivated in Papua New Guinea, has an edible root that needs to be mashed by pestle and mortar

4000 BC Beer is brewed in Mesopotamia, where barley is an indigenous crop

4000 BC A simple hand-held plough is in use in Egypt and Mesopotamia, at least 1000 years before a heavier version is pulled by oxen

4000 BC In Mesopotamia, and on the grass steppes of southern Russia, oxen are used

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to pull heavy loads on sledges

4000 BC Oxen are the first draught animals, in use at this time in the Middle East and in Europe

4000 BC A passage grave with a superb corbelled dome is constructed on the Île Longue off the southern coast of Brittany

4400 BC The first evidence of a loom comes from this period in Egypt, but some simple method of holding the warp must be as old as weaving

5000 BC The Sahara, damp enough for the hippopotamus, supports neolithic communities until it begins to dry up in about 3000 BC

5000 BC Squash and chili are the first plants to be cultivated in America, in the Tehuácan valley in modern Mexico

5000 BC Human groups adapt to the conditions of northern Canada and then Greenland, living mainly as hunters of marine mammals

5800 BC Fragments of cloth, woven in Catal Huyuk, survive because they are carbonized in a fire

6500 BC Pottery fragments of this date survive in the neolithic site of Catal Huyuk

6500 BC The neolithic town of Khirokitia in Cyprus has a paved public street with lanes leading off to courtyards of round tent-like houses

6500 BC The neolithic town of Catal Huyuk has rectangular rooms with windows, a design with lasting appeal

6500 BC Catal Huyuk, in Anatolia, is the most extensive surviving example of a neolithic town

7000 BC Barley is cultivated in the Middle East

7000 BC Neolithic communities in eastern Anatolia make implements of hammered copper - the first tentative step out of the Stone Age

8000 BC With the end of the most recent ice age, and the withdrawal of the ice sheet, there are drastic changes of climate and ecology in every region

8000 BC As temperatures warm, the sea level rises, submerging the Bering land bridge and isolating the Siberian immigrants as the aboriginal Americans

8000 BC As the ice cap recedes, hunter-gatherers move up the eastern side of America into Newfoundland and the prairie provinces of Canada

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From 8000 BC The Neolithic Revolution continues to take place, at different times around the world, as people form settled communities, living by agriculture and the breeding of animals instead of hunting and gathering

8000 BC Humans cross from eastern Siberia to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, according to the earliest traces left by the Jomon culture

8000 BC The tower at Jericho is the world's earliest surviving fortification

8000 BC Any community growing and storing grain, surrounded by other groups dependent on gathering food, has a new and urgent need for protection from its neighbours

8000 BC The spindle develops naturally in the process of twisting fibres into thread by hand

8000 BC Sun-dried bricks are used in the construction of buildings in Jericho

8000 BC Jericho, often quoted as the first town, grows into a settlement covering ten acres

8000 BC Sheep are the first farm animals of which evidence of domestication survives, from a settlement in northern Iraq

8000 BC A settlement at Jericho subsists mainly by the cultivation of wheat, one of a small number of communities known to be doing so by this time

8000 BC Emmer and Einkorn are the two types of wheat cultivated as the first crops in the Neolithic Revolution

8000 BC Wheat is grown in the Middle East - the first cereal cultivated by man

8000 BC Human communities in the Middle East cultivate crops and domesticate animals, in the Neolithic Revolution

From 8000 BC The Neolithic period (New Stone Age) includes any settled human community still using exclusively stone tools

8000 BC The ending of the most recent ice age, making large prey extinct and the land more fertile, both prompts and enables humans to develop permanent settlements

12,000 years ago A canine jaw, discovered in a cave in Mesopotamia, is the earliest evidence of the domestication of dogs

14,000 to 10,000 years ago During the Mesolithic period (Middle Stone Age) humans continue to improve their tool-making skills but are still nomads and hunter- gatherers

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15,000 to 10,000 years ago Hunter-gatherers gradually extend their territory far into South America

15,000 years ago Archaeological evidence reveals that the central plains of north America by now have a widespread human population

15,000 years ago The walls of Altamira, an extensive cave in Spain, are decorated with paintings and engraved images of horses, deer and above all bison

15,000 years ago Needles of bone or ivory are now fine enough to take a thread as thin as horse hair

15,000 years ago The principle of the bow and arrow is developed, with yew or elm for the bow and points of flint on the arrows

15,000 years ago The La Brea tarpit in Los Angeles shows signs of human activity in the region

16,000 years ago The walls of the complex of caves at Lascaux in France are covered, over the years, with a vast number of paintings of animals

18,000 years ago A bison figurine is carved in mammoth ivory in the region of Zaraysk, southeast of Moscow

23,000 years ago Someone carves a figure of a flying bird, in mammoth ivory, in the Malta settlement in Siberia

24,000 years ago An unusually decorated female figurine is carved from limestone at Kostenky, in the river Don region of Russia

25,000 years ago A Brassempouy, in France, a Venus figurine is carved which is the oldest known example to have facial features

25,000 years ago A Stone Age sculptor shapes a timeless image of female fecundity in the famous Willendorf Venus

27,000 years ago In the earliest known example of ceramics, humans at Dolni Vestonice model figures in burnt clay

29,000 years ago In the Cosquer cave near Marseilles, with its entrance now far below sea level, a hand print is made

30,000 years ago Painted and engraved images, on the rock face in a cave near Twyfelfontein in Namibia, date from this period

30,000 years ago With the sea level falling, a land bridge (known as Beringia) forms between Siberia and Alaska, enabling humans to enter the continent of America

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30,000 years ago With the onset of the most recent Ice Age (the Holocene), layers of ice up to two miles thick blanket northern regions, causing a massive reduction in sea level

31,000 years ago Rhinoceroses, lions and mammoth feature on the walls of the Chauvet cave, in southern France

35,000 to 14,000 years ago The Upper Palaeolithic era is the final section of the Old Stone Age, lasting until the Neolithic Era

35,000 years ago The Neanderthals vanish quite suddenly from the fossil record, leaving modern humans as the only surviving members of our species

35,000 years ago The earliest known Venus figurine, with very much emphasized sexual features, is carved near the Hohle Fels cave in Germany from the tusk of a woolly mammoth

35,000 years ago Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers use mammoth tusks and bones to support hide-covered tents at Dolni Vestonice (in the Czech Republic)

45,000 years ago Neanderthals carve a flute from the leg bone of a young bear, in the r egion that is now Slovenia

50,000 to 30,000 years ago Neanderthals decline in numbers, first in Asia and then in Europe

60,000 years ago The first human inhabitants of Australia make the crossing from south east Asia

77,000 years ago In the Blombos cave in South Africa stones are engraved with patterns of lines, either decorative or practical (as a form of tally)

90,000 years ago Fossilized bones found in the caves of Skhul and Qafzeh, in modern Israel, are of anatomically modern humans

120,000 to 35,000 years ago The Middle Palaeolithic era covers the period when Neanderthals and modern humans coexist in Europe and Asia

130,000 years ago Neanderthal man is by now well established in Europe and Asia, probably having evolved after his ancestors left Africa

150,000 years ago A possible second migration from Africa begins, involving at some time the ancestors of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens

230,000 years ago Humans evolve who can be classified as Homo sapiens - among them Neanderthal Man

250,000 years ago A spear of hardened yew, presumably flung or thrust by a human,

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fixes itself between the ribs of an elephant in what is now Saxony

500,000 years ago Fire is used in China by Peking man, and may have been in use much earlier in Africa

500,000 years ago Peking man shelters in caves south of modern Beijing, leaving many scraps of evidence of his way of life

800,000 years ago Humans are by this time living in Britain, in what is now Norfolk, and are making stone tools

800,000 years ago The last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals evolves in Africa (possibly the species known as Homo Rhodesiensis)

1 million years ago It is impossible to know when and how human beings first speak, but elementary speech may well go back a million years

1.6 million years ago Humans in coastal areas of South Africa extend their diet to include shellfish and other marine sources of food

1.6 million years ago A Homo erectus boy, aged about ten, lives near Lake Turkana in Kenya and dies at Nariokotome

1.7 million years ago Homo erectus, moves out of Africa and begins to spread through Europe and Asia

1.7 million years ago The ice ages set in, to continue throughout most of human history

1.8 million years ago A species of human in east Africa, Homo erectus, is probably the first identifiable ancestor of modern man

1.85 million years ago A hominid, nicknamed Twiggy and thought to be in the species Homo habilis, is living in East Africa

2.2 to 1.4 million years ago Homo Habilis, the earliest widely acknowledged species in the genus Homo, lives in East Africa with a brain size much greater than the contemporary Australopithecus Boisei *** 2.2 million years ago Creatures of the genus Homo, classified as early modern humans, are living in east Africa

2.5 million years ago The earliest known chipped stone tools are made by hominids at Gona, in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia, close to the region where Ardi and Lucy lived many millennia earlier

2.6 to 1.2 million years ago The earliest Palaeolithic era, known as the Lower Palaeolithic, covers the period before the emergence of homo sapiens in the form of

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Neanderthal man

2.6 million to 14,000 years ago The Palaeolithic era or Old Stone age begins, characterized by hominid and human use of unpolished chipped stone tools

3.2 million years ago A female of the species Australopithecus Afarensis (nicknamed Lucy when her skeleton is found), lives in the Afar Depression in Ethiopia within 50 miles of where her predecessor Ardi was unearthed

3.6 million years old Two or three hominid individuals, probably Australopithecus Afarensis, walk upright through volcanic ash at Laetoli, 30 miles south of Olduvai Gorge, and their footprints are preserved within subsequent ash deposits

4.4 million years ago Ardi, the earliest known individual of partially human type (or hominid), is of the species Ardipithecus, in the Awash valley region of Ethiopia

4.5 million years ago Certain primates, in eastern and southern Africa, are by now sufficiently like humans to be classed as hominids

6 million years ago Various species of ape develop the habit of walking upright on two feet *** 15 million years ago A primate of this period, at ease both in the trees and on the ground, is probably the common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans

45 million years ago Primates evolve, from lemur-like animals to monkeys

50 million years ago Australia becomes a separate land mass, isolating its living creatures. They evolve into many species unique to the area

65 million years ago Mammals evolve in many new forms on land and in the water, using opportunities made possible by the extinction of the dinosaurs

65 million years ago In a very short space of time the dinosaurs die out, for reasons as yet uncertain

125 million years ago Primitive birds begin to feature in the fossil record

150 million years ago Archaeopteryx has the skeletal structure of a dinosaur and the feathers of a bird, intermediate between the two species

170 million years ago Mammals begin to make their appearance

200 million years ago The process of continental drift, beginning 200 million years ago, results eventually in our present arrangement of six continents

225 million years ago The dinosaurs dominate the planet in a way that no previous

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creature has been able to *** 250 million years ago The entire land surface of the earth merges into a single continent, known as Pangaea, which after about 50 million years splits in two

300 million years ago Reptiles develop evolutionary advantages for adaptation to a wide range of environments

340 million years ago Amphibians develop lungs, enabling them to live on land as well as in the water

350 million years ago Insects become the first creatures capable of living their full life span out of the water - and the first to master flight

400 million years ago Plants, previously living only in the seas and rivers, begin to establish themselves on land

1 billion years ago Sponges and jellyfish drift in the sea, to be joined later by more purposeful shrimps and lobsters

3 billion years ago Single-celled water creatures, such as algae, begin the 2-billion- year process of evolving into slightly more complex forms of life

3.5 billion years ago Fossilized bacteria have been found in rock 3.5 billion years old in Africa

4 billion years ago The earth's surface settles into a heaving turmoil of rock and water *** 4.5 billion years ago The earth condenses into a solid sphere, with an inner core which is extremely dense and hot

4.6 billion years ago The new star settles down, while nuclear dust in the vicinity coalesces into planets and asteroids orbiting the sun

4.6 billion years ago A new galaxy, the Milky Way, forms - and one of its stars is our sun

12 billion years ago The first galaxies begin to form, as self-contained gravitational systems with gases gradually coalescing into stars

13 billion years ago As gravity exerts its pressure within parts of the expanding fireball, subnuclear particles merge into more complex elements

13.7 billion years ago Hydrogen and helium nuclei form in the first three minutes, with perhaps another 300,000 years before they combine with electrons to form atoms

13.7 billion years ago Big Bang, an unimaginably large explosion from an unimaginably

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small particle - according to modern theory the first moment of the universe

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