On Stalin's orders Dmitry Shostakovich is attacked in Pravda for providing 'chaos instead of music'

The prototype of the Spitfire, designed by Reginald Mitchell, has its first test flight

Carl Orff's cantata Carmina Burana has its premiere in Frankfurt

Rachmaninov completes his Third Symphony, and records it two years later with the Philadelphia Orchestra

Unemployed English workers march for 26 days from Jarrow, in Tyne and Wear, to demonstrate at Westminster

Wallis Simpson wins a decree nisi against her second husband and is therefore free to marry Edward VIII

Hitler and Mussolini form an axis, or alliance, causing Germany and Italy to become known as the Axis powers

Francisco Franco is elected head of state of the insurgent Nationalist Spain, at this time controlling only a fraction of the country

The British Broadcasting Corporation puts out its first high-definition public television broadcast

The first volunteers in the International Brigade arrive in Spain to fight for the Republican cause in the civil war

The Spanish Civil War causes the Basque designer Cristobal Balenciaga to move his business to Paris, capital of the fashion world

Edward VIII informs Baldwin, the UK prime minister, that he intends to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson

Germany and Japan establish an Anti-Comintern Pact against their common enemy, the USSR

Edward VIII, forced to choose between the British throne and Wallis Simpson, opts for the path of love and abdicates

Edward VIII is succeeded on the British throne by his brother, as George VI

Hungarian photographer Robert Capa achieves an unprecedented immediacy in his coverage of the Spanish Civil War

French film director Jean Renoir makes La Grande Illusion, set in World War I

Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, condemning the Nazi ideology of racism

The Nationalist leader in Spain, Francisco Franco, merges Falange with other right-wing parties to form the Movimento

German planes bomb the Basque capital, Guernica, in support of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War

British artist Ben Nicholson does the first of his characteristic abstract white reliefs

William Walton writes Crown Imperial for the coronation of George VI

Neville Chamberlain follows Baldwin as prime minister at the head of the UK's National government

Under Nazi influence the University of Bonn deprives Thomas Mann of his honorary doctorate, which is restored to him in 1946

German-born British scientist Hans Krebs discovers the biochemical cycle that becomes known by his name