Gracie Fields makes her name when she appears in London as Sally Perkins in the musical Mr Tower of London

German author Thomas Mann publishes his novel The Magic Mountain

German scientist Felix Wankel builds a model of a rotary engine, thirty years before the first prototype is manufactured

André Breton launches a new movement with his Manifesto of surrealism - Soluble fish

A new German currency, the Reichsmark, is launched with the value of a trillion old marks

Ottorino Respighi's symphonic poem Pines of Rome has its first performance in Rome

Four Scottish Colourists (Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter, Peploe) exhibit together in Paris

Leos Janacek's opera The Cunning Little Vixen, based on verses by Rudolf Tesnohlídek, is premiered in Brno

Giacomo Puccini dies without finishing his opera Turandot, which is subsequently completed by Franco Alfani

E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India builds on cultural misconceptions between the British and Indian communities

Christopher Robin features for the first time in A.A. Milne's When We Were Very Young

Benito Mussolini arrests opposition politicians, takes control of the press and assumes dictatorial powers in Italy

The Central Committee of the USSR removes Trotsky from his influential post as War Commissar

The first volume of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is published

23-year-old German physicist Werner Heisenberg publishes his ground-breaking theory of quantum mechanics

Field marshal Paul von Hindenburg is elected president of the Weimar Republic in Germany

The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein completes his film about the 1905 revolution, The Battleship Potemkin

Britain and other nations return to a revived version of the gold standard, under the new name of Gold Exchange Standard

Maurice Ravel and Colette provide music and libretto for the opera The Child and the Enchantments

A fashionable new style, Art Deco, derives its name from a Paris exhibition called the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs Industriels et Modernes

Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli formulates his exclusion principle, stating that no two electrons in an atom can have the same four quantum numbers

A Protocol signed in Geneva probibits the use in warfare of poisonous gas and bacteriological weapons

Franz Kafka's novel The Trial is published posthumously

English writer Ivy Compton-Burnett finds her characteristic voice in her second novel, Pastors and Masters

Anton Webern again follows Schoenberg, this time into serialism, when he adopts the 12-note method for his Three Traditional Rhymes