The Western powrers respond to the Soviet blockade by launching the Berlin airlift, flying in necessary provisions of every kind

Roland Petit's ballet Carmen, starring himself and his wife Zizi Jeanmaire, is a sensation at its London premiere

French ex-convict Jean Genet begins his literary career with an autobiographical Thief's Journal

Ealing Studios produce a film of Compton Mackenzie's 1947 novel Whisky Galore, about an alcoholic windfall on the island of Barra

Karl von Frisch demonstrates that bees make use of the polarized light of the sun to calculate direction

The Christian Democrats win the first elections in Germany since 1933, and Konrad Adenauer becomes chancellor of West Germany

French author Simone de Beauvoir publishes The Second Sex, a widely influential feminist polemic

Bertolt Brecht establishes a new theatrical company, the Berliner Ensemble, in East Germany

Carol Reed directs The Third Man, starring Orson Welles and written by Graham Greene

Enid Blyton introduces her most successful character, Noddy, a small boy who can't avoid nodding when he speaks

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss publishes Elementary Structures of Kinship

British atomic physicist Klaus Fuchs is discovered to be a Soviet agent, passing nuclear secrets to the USSR

The world's first commercial jet airliner, the Comet, designed by de Havilland, goes into service with BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation)

Eire is renamed the republic of Ireland and withdraws from the Commonwealth, severing the last link with the British crown

The British government declares that northern Ireland will remain British unless the parliament in Stormont decides otherwise

George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel set in a terrifying totalitarian state of the future, watched over by Big Brother

The Soviet Union lifts the blockade on Berlin and the airlift ends, after providing for nearly a year a lifeline to the city

The Federal Republic of Germany is formed from the British, French and US zones of occupation

The USSR grants nominal independence to east Germany as the newly established German Democratic Republic

French dramatist Eugène Ionesco's play The Bald Prima Donna launches the Theatre of the Absurd

A prehistoric victim of strangling is found in Tollund Moss in Denmark, with part of the noose still round his neck

The Family Moskat, about a Jewish family in Warsaw, is the first of Isaac Bashevis Singer's books to be published in English

C.S. Lewis gives the first glimpse of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

British author Doris Lessing publishes her first novel, The Grass is Singing

Kirsten Flagstad sings the posthumous premiere, in London, of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs