Leningrad's opera and ballet company is renamed the Kirov, in memory of the city's recently assassinated commissar

New Nazi laws announced at Nuremberg strip Jews of their German citizenship

Italian baritone Tito Gobbi makes his operatic debut in Gubbio in Bellini's La Somnambula

Mussolini uses a disagreement over grazing rights as a pretext for an empire-building invasion of Ethiopia

A collection of Constantine Cavafy's poems is published in Alexandria in an undated edition

British publisher Allen Lane launches a paperback series to which he gives the name Penguin Books

Alban Berg's opera Lulu is incomplete when the composer dies

Salvador Dali creates a stir by attending the opening of London's Surrealist exhibition in a diving suit

The rest of Europe offers no effective objection when Adolf Hitler moves his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland

German architect Werner March designs spectacular buildings for the Berlin Olympics

García Lorca writes his play The House of Bernarda Alba in the last year of his short life

Stalin stages the first of the Moscow show trials, designed to eliminate any surviving high-level opponents

Membership of the Hitler Youth (for boys) or the League of German Maidens is made compulsory

In response to the gang violence of Oswald Mosley's black-shirted thugs, a Public Order Act in the UK bans political uniforms

British mathematician Alan Turing writes an influential paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidung Problem

Maxim Gorky dies in suspicious circumstances while undergoing routine medical treatment in the USSR

John Maynard Keynes defines his economics in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

Hitler gives Reinhard Heydrich control of the Gestapo

A rebellion by Spanish troops in Morocco is soon led by Francisco Franco and sparks the Spanish Civil War

Mussolini appoints his son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, as his minister for foreign affairs

In Language, Truth and Logic 26-year-old A.J. Ayer produces a classic exposition of Logical Positivism

At the Berlin Olympics, attended by Hitler, the African-American athlete Jesse Owens sets three new Olympic records and equals a fourth

Terence Rattigan's first play, French without Tears, is performed in London

In the first month of the Spanish Civil War the playwright García Lorca is arrested and shot by rebel Falange militia

Alexander Korda's bleakly visionary film Things to Come is based on the H.G. Wells novel of 1933