The US tennis player Billie Jean King wins the first of six Wimbledon singles titles

After a long period of obscurity, Wide Sargasso Sea brings novelist Jean Rhys back into the literary limelight

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard, is produced at the Edinburgh Festival

The Whale, a cantata by English composer John Tavener, has its premiere at the inaugural concert of the London Sinfonietta

Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman has a great success when published posthumously

A coup in Greece brings in an incompetent and repressive military junta that becomes known as the 'Greek colonels'

Luis Buñuel directs Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, a film about a bored housewife who takes a day job as a prostitute

A Bigger Splash, by English painter David Hockney, casts a new light on sunlit swimming pools

English yachtsman Francis Chichester completes a record round-the-world voyage, sailing 29,600 miles solo in 226 days

British research student Jocelyn Bell and her Cambridge supervisor Antony Hewish identify the first known pulsar

British composers Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies found the Pierrot Players

English author Angela Carter wins recognition with her quirky second novel, The Magic Toyshop

English playwright Alan Ayckbourn has his first success with Relatively Speaking

Three young Liverpool poets publish a shared anthology under the title The Mersey Sound

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, by English dramatist Peter Nichols, has its premiere in London

English cellist Jacqueline du Pré marries Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim

Nicolae Ceauşescu becomes president of the State Council of Romania

The Beatles release an immensely successful album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with a cover by British pop-artist Peter Blake

Alexander Dubcek becomes first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist party, following pressure for reform from party intellectuals

New Czech leader Alexander Dubcek facilitates the Prague Spring, aiming in his words to provide 'socialism with a human face'

British actor Richard Attenborough makes his first film as a director, Oh! What a Lovely War

Ezra Pound publishes his last collection of cantos, Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX - CXVII

Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung ('Tuning') employs six unaccompanied voices for 75 minutes

A student revolt begins in Paris and sweeps through France, shaking de Gaulle's government

English biographer Michael Holroyd completes his two-volume life of Lytton Strachey