Bucharest, the capital of Romania, is captured by Austrian and Bulgarian forces

Herbert Asquith resigns in the face of a political coup against him, and is replaced as UK prime minister by Lloyd George

Philippe Pétain becomes a French national hero for his successful defence of Verdun

Prince Georgi Lvov becomes prime minister in Russia's new Provisional Government

Wartime scarcity causes sugar rationing to be imposed in Britain, to be followed soon by meat and butter and related products

The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire is the first to use the term Surrealism

Jeeves and Bertie Wooster make their first appearance in P.G. Wodehouse's The Man with Two Left Feet

John Ireland's Second Violin Concerto meets with immediate approval

Wounded at the front on the Somme, the poet Wilfred Owen is invalided home to Britain

Amedeo Modigliani's first Paris exhibition is immediately closed by the police because it contains paintings of nudes

Piet Mondrian and other Dutch artists establish the movement known as De Stijl, together with a magazine of the same name

Eamon de Valera, newly released from prison, is elected to lead Sinn Fein

Manuel de Falla's ballet The Three-Cornered Hat is produced by Diaghilev with choreography by Massine and designs by Picasso

Foreign Secretary A.J. Balfour declares Britain's conditional support for a homeland in Palestine for the Jews

Otto Klemperer starts a seven-year spell as music director of Cologne opera, and begins to acquire an international reputation

Paul Valéry wins praise for his long symbolic poem La Jeune Parque

Anti-German feeling causes the British royal family to adopt the name Windsor instead of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha

German troops on the western front begin withdrawal to the recently constructed defences of the Hindenburg Line

A mutiny by soldiers, in support of Petrograd demonstrators, proves a turning point in Russia's February revolution

Crowds demonstrating in Petrograd are fired on after tsar Nicholas II sanctions the use of force

An uprising in Petrograd brings the Peter and Paul fortress into the hands of the rebels

With his capital city in the hands of rebels, tsar Nicholas II abdicates

The Petrograd Soviet demands drastic reforms in return for supporting the proposed Provisional Government in Russia

The German authorities allow Lenin to travel home from Switzerland through Germany, hoping for Communist disruption of the Russian war effort

Lenin expounds in Petrograd the new theory of his April Theses, predicting the possibility of imminent revolution