Edward Elgar completes his last great work, the Cello Concerto in E minor

The Swiss theologian Karl Barth publishes his influential Commentary on Romans, taking St Paul's epistle as his text

The Soviet system of Gulag slave labour camps is introduced, under the control of the secret service, the Cheka

John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown fly from St John's in Newfoundland to Clifden in Ireland

Mussolini's Fascist party rapidly acquires an aggressive presence, thanks to his gangs of armed thugs in their blackshirt uniforms

Adolf Hitler joins the tiny German Workers' party, the members of which share his own virulent anti-semitism

French poets Louis Aragon and André Breton launch Littérature, a surrealist review

Nancy Astor, as MP for Plymouth, becomes the first woman to take her seat in Britain's House of Commons

The port of Fiume, belonging to Yugoslavia, is seized by Gabriele d'Annunzio and 300 Italian volunteers

Walter Gropius becomes director of the newly formed Bauhaus in Weimar

Marcel Duchamp adds a moustache and beard to a postcard of the Mona Lisa, and gives it the subtly offensive French title LHOOQ

In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes publishes a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany

A White army, advancing on Moscow, is stopped about 250 miles from the city

A White army occupies hills overlooking Petrograd before being driven back by Trotsky

The phrase Abstract Expressionism is first used, describing the work of Wassily Kandinsky

Darius Milhaud provides the score for Jean Cocteau's pantomime ballet Le Boeuf sur le toit

John Singer Sargent completes Gassed, a powerful image of one of the particular horrors of the recent war

The prime minister of Poland, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, resigns his post so as to concentrate on his concert career

The Spartacus League transforms itself into the Communist party of Germany

A vast crowd, assembling in Berlin, calls for a revolution and begins to seize public buildings

After ten days of street fighting in Berlin, Spartacus leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg are captured and shot

The delegates to the peace conference in Paris, mainly concerned with the terms to be imposed on Germany, hold their first session

The German assembly meets in Weimar and elects Ebert as president of the new republic

Delegates to the Paris peace conference unanimously establish the League of Nations

German sailors scuttle every one of the fifty warships held by the British in Scapa Flow