Pope Paul VI issues the encyclical Humanae Vitae, condemning all methods of artificial birth control

Antonio de Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, suffers a stroke and is replaced by Marcelo Caetano

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel Cancer Ward is smuggled to New York for publication

Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring

Reformist Czech leader Alexander Dubcek is arrested and flown to Moscow

The first civil rights march in northern Ireland, in Derry, is halted by the police with batons and water cannon

Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis marries Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the assassinated president

The Provisional IRA reintroduces terrorism to northern Ireland after Protestants attack a civil rights march

The Anglo-French airliner Concorde makes its first supersonic test flight

British artist duo Gilbert & George attract attention miming to Flanagan and Allen's Underneath the Arches

English novelist John Fowles publishes The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in Lyme Regis in the 1860s

Peter Maxwell Davies writes Eight Songs for a Mad King for the Pierrot Players

The first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus is broadcast on British TV

Moscow imposes Gustav Husak as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, with the brief to reverse Dubcek's reforms

President de Gaulle resigns after losing a plebiscite on government reform

Georges Pompidou is elected president of France in succession to de Gaulle

Russian chess player Boris Spassky beats Tigran Petrosian to become world champion

Italian composer Luciano Berio completes his Sinfonia for eight voices and orchestra

Willy Brandt, leader of the SPD (Social Democratic Party), becomes chancellor of Germany

British scientists Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards fertilize in a test-tube eggs removed from human ovaries

Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik's Universal Prayer, a cantata setting poetry by Alexander Pope, has its premiere in New York

Italian playwright Dario Fo's black comedy Accidental Death of an Anarchist has its premiere in Milan

Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova defects to the west while on tour with the Kirov company in London

Polish composer Witold Lutoslawksi writes a cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wins the Nobel Prize for Literature but declines collecting it in Stockholm for fear of being denied re-entry to Russia