Europe timeline
Henri Matisse completes his Backsequence – four progressively simplified bronze relief sculptures (Nus de Dos)
French actor Jean Gabin makes his screen debut in Chacun sa Chance
Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence star in the West End in Private Lives, Coward's comedy of marital complications
British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac predicts the existence of an anti-particle of the electron, first observed two years later and named the positron
The Nazis become the second largest party in the Reichstag, winning 107 seats
Agatha Christie's Miss Marple makes her first appearance, in Murder at the Vicarage
The airship R101, designed by a UK Air Ministry team, explodes on its maiden vogage, killing all but four of those on board
English composer John Ireland's Piano Concerto has its first performance
Australian-born composer Percy Grainger writes variations on Handel's tune The Harmonious Blacksmith
The British Broadcasting Corporation forms a Symphony Orchestra with Adrian Boult as the first music director
The Statute of Westminster defines and formalizes the concept of the British Commonwealth
25 million peasants are moved from the land to provide cheap labour in Stalin's new factories
Six million Russian peasants die after being transported to agricultural labour camps in Siberia
The gold standard is abandoned throughout the world after massive capital outflows cause the United Kingdom to pull out of the system
Geoffrey De Havilland designs the Tiger Moth, on which nearly all British pilots were trained during World War II
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels makes Der Führer a compulsory term for Hitler in the Nazi party
The Irish government classifies the Irish Republican Army as an illegal organization
Amid political crisis Labour-leader Ramsay MacDonald forms an all-party National Government in Britain
Virginia Woolf publishes the most fluid of her novels, The Waves, in which she tells the story through six interior monologues
In Pietr-Le-Letton, the first novel published under his own name, the Belgian writer Georges Simenon introduces Inspector Maigret
Pay cuts cause British sailors in the Atlantic fleet to mutiny at Invergordon, in Scotland's Cromarty Firth
Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli introduces a successful new line for women in the form of the padded shoulder
In his painting The Persistence of Memory Salvador Dali provides the disturbing image of watches drooping from the edge of flat surfaces
George V reads on radio a Christmas address (written by Rudyard Kipling), beginning an annual royal tradition
Russian-born architect Berthold Lubetkin and others set up in London the modernist firm of Tecton