The Ulster Unionist Party is founded in Belfast to oppose Home Rule

English physiologists William Bayliss and Ernest Starling coin the word 'hormone' for glandular secretions into the bloodstream

H.G. Wells publishes Kipps: the story of a simple soul, a comic novel about a bumbling draper's assistant

Bernard Shaw has two new plays opening in London in the same year, Major Barbara and Man and Superman

The designer Edward Gordon Craig publishes a theatrical manifesto, The Art of the Theatre

Sir Percy Blakeney rescues aristocrats from the guillotine in Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel

Britain's Labour Party achieves its first electoral success, winning twenty-nine seats at Westminster

Britain launches HMS Dreadnought, the first of a massive new class of battleship

English biologist William Bateson uses the word 'genetics' to describe the phenomenon of heredity and variation

Frederick Soddy observes his first examples of chemically identical elements with differing atomic weights, to which he later gives the name isotopes

17-year-old Charlie Chaplin joins the Fred Karno company, touring slapstick comedy

E. Nesbit publishes The Railway Children, the most successful of her books featuring the Bastable family

The Cunard company launches the Lusitania on the Clyde as a sister ship to the Mauretania

Ethel Smyth's most successful opera, The Wreckers, is premiered in Leipzig

John Galsworthy publishes The Man of Property, the first of his novels chronicling the family of Soames Forsyte

J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World provokes violent reactions at its Dublin premiere

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

Edmund Gosse publishes Father and Son, an account of his difficult relationship with his fundamentalist father, Philip Gosse

Dutch and British companies (Royal Dutch Oil, Shell Transport and Trading) merge to form Royal Dutch Shell Oil

An Entente signed between Britain and Russia follows on from the 1904 Entente Cordiale with France to establish a new Triple Entente

Charles Stewart Rolls and Henry Royce build their most famous car, the Silver Ghost, in the factory they have set up in Derby

James Joyce completes the eight short stories eventually published in 1914 as Dubliners

The world's first custom-built motor-racing track opens at Brooklands, near Weybridge in Surrey

Frederick Delius completes Brigg Fair, an 'English Rhapsody' for orchestra, first performed in Liverpool in 1908

Samuel Simon, working in Manchester, takes out a patent for the use of silk to support a stencil