English composer William Walton writes Orb and Sceptre for the coronation of Elizabeth II

Dmitry Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony has its first performance in Leningrad nine months after the death of Stalin

French composer Olivier Messiaen uses birdsong with piano and orchestra in his Waking of the Birds

Anglican vicar Chad Varah, using the crypt of a London church, sets up the first branch of what becomes the Samaritans

French actor Jacques Tati directs and stars in the zany comedy Mr Hulot's Holiday

Swedish economist Dag Hammarskjöld becomes secretary-general of the United Nations

The first Soviet hydrogen bomb is successfully tested at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan

Improved methods of testing prove conclusively that Piltdown Man was constructed by Charles Dawson from a human skull and the jaw of an ape

Secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria is executed by the new Soviet regime

Molecular biologists Francis Crick and James Watson announce their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA

Dylan Thomas's 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood, is broadcast on BBC radio, with Richard Burton as narrator

A painting by Graham Sutherland, commissioned for Winston Churchill's 80th birthday, does not meet with the full approval of the sitter or his wife

The German firm NSU builds the first working example of the rotary engine invented in 1924 by Felix Wankel

Politician and author Winston Churchill completes his six-volume history The Second World War

Oxford medical student Roger Bannister runs the first four-minute mile, at the Iffley Road track

Anglo-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch publishes her first novel, Under the Net

George Grivas leads a guerrilla movement, EOKA, fighting for Cyprus's independence from Britain and union with Greece

19-year-old Françoise Sagan has a major international success with her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse

18-year-old English jockey Lester Piggott wins the first of a record nine Derbys

Federico Fellini directs La Strada ('The Road'), starring his wife, Giulietta Masina, and Antony Quinn

Relations are normalized between West Germany and the USA, France and Britain, ending the postwar period of occupation

William Walton's opera Troilus and Cressida has its premiere at Covent Garden

English author Kingsley Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim, strikes an anti-establishment chord

William Golding gives a chilling account of schoolboy savagery in his first novel, Lord of the Flies

Le Corbusier completes the reinforced-concrete pilgrimage church of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp