Kasimir Malevich exhibits his painting Black Square in Petrograd, in the final Futurist exhibition

The Irish painter Jack Yeats develops a romantic Expressionist style, with a new interest in Celtic myth

The English writer Virginia Woolf publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret develops Maison Domino, a system of low-cost housing with reinforced concrete columns and precast floors

D.H. Lawrence's novel about the Brangwen family, The Rainbow, is seized by the police as an obscene work

The Russian poet and dramatist Vladimir Mayakovsky publishes his first major long poem, A Cloud in Trousers

Secret agent Richard Hannay makes his first appearance in John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps

Rupert Brooke's 1914 and Other Poems is published a few months after his death in Greece

Einstein submits a paper, The field equations of gravitation, containing the sums required to explain the general theory of relativity

Petrograd buzzes with rumours about Rasputin's dissolute life, including salacious hints that he is the lover of the empress Alexandra

Germans make an experimental but ineffective use of chlorine gas against the Russians in Poland

A Zeppelin airship makes a night-time bombing raid on the English port of Great Yarmouth

The German battle cruiser Blücher is sunk by the British off the Dogger Bank

Two passenger liners are sunk by German U-boats

Winston Churchill is a firm supporter of a new invention, the tank, encouraging its initial development while still at the Admiralty

A typhus epidemic sweeps through Serbia, severely weakening the nation's armed forces

Two German Zeppelin airships bomb Paris, causing 23 deaths

In a secret pact, signed in London, Italy is promised territorial gains if she joins the Allied side

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

The Germans attempt an advance on the western front, launching the second battle of Ypres

The Germans gain ground at Ypres after the first significant use of chlorine gas

Italy revokes the Triple Alliance of 1882 that aligned her with Germany and Austria-Hungary

The British passenger liner Lusitania is sunk by a U-boat, with the loss of 1000 civilian lives

Italy declares war against Austria-Hungary, but not as yet against Germany

A German Zeppelin airship makes the first bombing raid on London