The first opera festival at Glyndebourne, a country house in Sussex, opens with a performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro

British tennis player Fred Perry wins the first of three consecutive Wimbledon singles titles

British painter Francis Bacon has his first solo show in London

The Scottish National Party, or SNP, is founded to campaign for an independent Scotland

In I, Claudius the autobiography of the Roman emperor is ghost-written by Robert Graves

In A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh sends his hero Tony Last to a disastrous fate, far away in the Amazon rain forest

15-year-old English ballerina Margot Fonteyn makes her first appearance, dancing as a Snowflake in Nutcracker

T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral has its first performance in Canterbury cathedral

British publisher Allen Lane launches a paperback series to which he gives the name Penguin Books

Salvador Dali creates a stir by attending the opening of London's Surrealist exhibition in a diving suit

In response to the gang violence of Oswald Mosley's black-shirted thugs, a Public Order Act in the UK bans political uniforms

British mathematician Alan Turing writes an influential paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidung Problem

John Maynard Keynes defines his economics in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

In Language, Truth and Logic 26-year-old A.J. Ayer produces a classic exposition of Logical Positivism

Terence Rattigan's first play, French without Tears, is performed in London

Alexander Korda's bleakly visionary film Things to Come is based on the H.G. Wells novel of 1933

The prototype of the Spitfire, designed by Reginald Mitchell, has its first test flight

Unemployed English workers march for 26 days from Jarrow, in Tyne and Wear, to demonstrate at Westminster

Wallis Simpson wins a decree nisi against her second husband and is therefore free to marry Edward VIII

The British Broadcasting Corporation puts out its first high-definition public television broadcast

Edward VIII informs Baldwin, the UK prime minister, that he intends to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson

Edward VIII, forced to choose between the British throne and Wallis Simpson, opts for the path of love and abdicates

Edward VIII is succeeded on the British throne by his brother, as George VI

British artist Ben Nicholson does the first of his characteristic abstract white reliefs

William Walton writes Crown Imperial for the coronation of George VI