Charles Stewart Rolls becomes the first man to fly non-stop across the English Channel and back

Robert Falcon Scott sails south in the Terra Nova on his second voyage towards the South Pole

Winston Churchill becomes home secretary in Asquith's Liberal government

John Buchan publishes Prester John, the first of his adventure stories

Charles Stewart Rolls dies in a flying accident shortly after his record cross-Channel flight

Telegraph messages lead to the arrest of Dr Crippen and his mistress Ethel Le Neve in mid-Atlantic

H.G. Wells publishes The History of Mr Polly, a novel about an escape from drab everyday existence

Rudyard Kipling publishes If, which rapidly becomes his most popular poem among the British

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

E.M. Forster publishes Howard's End, his novel about the Schlegel sisters and the Wilcox family

The part-time English painter L.S. Lowry begins a lifetime career in a Manchester property company

Charles Wilson, using his cloud chamber to detect the passage of charged particles, obtains his first photographs of alpha and beta rays

Ernest Rutherford proposes the concept of the nucleus as a positively charged mass at the centre of an atom

Ethel Smyth's The March of Women has its premiere at a suffragette event in London's Albert Hall

D.H. Lawrence's career as a writer is launched with the publication of his first novel, The White Peacock

Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova settles in London and forms her own touring company

Rupert Brooke publishes Poems, the only collection to appear before his early death in World War I

G.K. Chesterton's clerical detective makes his first appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown

The Titanic is launched at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast

Walter Sickert and other painters, sharing his preference for everyday subjects, adopt the name Camden Town Group

Asquith's Parliament Bill proposes to end the constitutional crisis in the UK by restricting the power of the House of Lords

Confronted with the threat of 300 newly created peerages, the House of Lords narrowly passes Asquith's Parliament Bill (by 17 votes)

Max Beerbohm publishes his novel Zuleika Dobson, in which the beauty of his heroine causes havoc among the students at Oxford

Edward Carson tells a vast crowd in Northern Ireland that they must be ready to defend their Protestant province by force

UK suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst is arrested, released and rearrested twelve times within the year