Michael Tippett's first opera, A Midsummer Marriage, has its premiere at Covent Garden

Swedish director Ingmar Bergman wins international fame with his film Smiles of a Summer Night

81-year-old Winston Churchill resigns as Britain's prime minister and is succeeded by Anthony Eden

Russia forms the Warsaw Treaty Organization (or Warsaw Pact) with her east European allies, as a counterbalance to NATO

Kingsley Amis and other young writers in Britain become known as Angry Young Men

Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American is set in contemporary Vietnam and foresees troubles ahead

Thomas Mann publishes a longer but still incomplete version of his novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

Austria achieves a much delayed return to nationhood after the Soviet Union finally agrees to withdraw from the country

Konrad Adenauer negotiates the release of the last 10,000 German prisoners of war held in the USSR

English poet Philip Larkin finds his distinctive voice in his collection The Less Deceived

British dancer Joan Benesh and her husband Rudolf develop the Benesh system of dance notation

Archaeologists at Olympia excavate the workshop of the Greek classical sculptor Phidias

British philologist J.R.R. Tolkien publishes the third and final volume of his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings

Brigitte Bardot is directed by her husband Roger Vadim in his first film, And God Created Woman

Nikita Khrushchev denounces Stalin, dead now for three years, at a party congress in the USSR

English poet Ted Hughes marries US poet Sylvia Plath

The Visit, by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, has its premiere in Zürich

Karlheinz Stockhausen's Song of the Children combines electronic sounds and the human voice

Russian dancer Galina Ulanova proves a sensation on tour in Europe and the USA in her late forties

The USA and Britain withdraw their offer of financial aid for Nasser's Aswan dam

Sicilian author Giuseppe de Lampedusa completes his novel The Leopard, but does not live to see it published

Hans Werner Henze's opera The Stag King has its premiere in Berlin

John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger features in the first season of London's new English Stage Company

Students are fired on in Budapest when protesting against repressive Communist policies

Confronted by a popular uprising, Communist leaders in Hungary bring back the reformist prime minister Imre Nagy