The Anglo-French airliner Concorde makes its first supersonic test flight

British artist duo Gilbert & George attract attention miming to Flanagan and Allen's Underneath the Arches

English novelist John Fowles publishes The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in Lyme Regis in the 1860s

Peter Maxwell Davies writes Eight Songs for a Mad King for the Pierrot Players

The first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus is broadcast on British TV

British scientists Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards fertilize in a test-tube eggs removed from human ovaries

Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova defects to the west while on tour with the Kirov company in London

Michael Tippett's opera The Knot Garden has its premiere at Covent Garden

Ian Paisley and others in northern Ireland form the Democratic Unionist Party, as the intransigent wing of Ulster Unionism

Gerry Adams is imprisoned for suspected IRA links but is released for lack of evidence

Internment without trial, reintroduced in Ulster to deal with the developing crisis, is used at first only against Catholics suspected of terrorism

British artist David Hockney paints a striking triple portrait in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar is staged a year after being released as a record

British paratroops open fire on a civil rights march in Derry, killing thirteen, in what becomes known as Bloody Sunday

The British government suspends the parliament at Stormont and imposes direct rule from Westminster

Ultimos Ritos ('Last Rites'), an oratorio by John Tavener, has its first performance in Haarlem in the Netherlands

Peter Maxwell Davies's opera Taverneris performed at Covent Garden

English dramatist Caryl Churchill's first play, Owners, is produced in London

English poet James Fenton publishes his first collection, Terminal Moraine

British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher publishes an influential economic tract, Small is Beautiful

The career of virtuoso cellist Jacqueline du Pré's is cut short by multiple sclerosis

Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, publishes his first novel, The Rachel Papers

Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell dance together in the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan's Manon

British physicist Stephen Hawking describes how black holes can emit radiation, a process now known as 'Hawking radiation'

Internment is ended in Ulster after the Gardiner Report states that it brings the law into disrepute