English author A.S. Byatt publishes her first novel, Shadow of a Sun

The Beatles reach number one in both the UK and the US with their single 'Can't Buy Me Love'

Nikita Khrushchev is forced from office as Soviet leader by a conservative faction that includes Leonid Brezhnev

The USSR enters a brief period of coalition leadership by Alexei Kosygin as prime minister and Leonid Brezhnev as Party First Secretary

Surgeons Michael Bakey in the USA and Vasilii Kolesov in the USSR pioneer coronary bypass surgery, using the patient's mammary artery

Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev dance together in the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet

Winston Churchill dies, and lies in state in London's ancient Westminster Hall

David Lean directs Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in a film of Pasternak's Dr Zhivago

The General Assembly of the UN asks Argentina and Britain to enter negotiations on their long-running dispute over the Falklands

Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov is the first to walk in space, moving round outside the Voshkod 2 spacecraft for more than ten minutes

18-year-old Dutch footballer Johann Cruyff joins Ajax, the club with which he will be associated in numerous successes

Terence O'Neill and Séan Lemass, prime ministers of Northern Ireland and Ireland, have two unprecedented meetings

Maria Callas gives her last performance, as Tosca at Covent Garden in London

Footballer Franz Beckenbauer plays his first international for West Germany

German performance artist Joseph Beuys walks round a gallery demonstrating How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare

The Second Vatican Council ends, having made some radical changes in the ritual and attitudes of the Roman Catholic church

The Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 is the first to achieve a soft-landing on the moon and to send back photographic data from the surface

Austrian author Peter Handke provokes interest with his first play Offending the Audience

The Soviet spacecraft Luna 10 orbits the moon and broadcasts the Internationale to the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party

British actor Michael Caine makes his name starring in two outstanding films within the year, Alfie and The Ipcress File

English novelist Paul Scott publishes The Jewel in the Crown, the first volume in his 'Raj Quartet'

Leonid Brezhnev, taking the title General Secretary (last used by Stalin), makes it plain that he is the Soviet leader

NATO headquarters moves to Brussels after de Gaulle expels all NATO personnel from French soil

Irish poet Seamus Heaney wins critical acclaim for Death of a Naturalist, his first volume containing more than a few poems

British fashion designer Mary Quant launches the miniskirt