Michael Tippett's opera The Knot Garden has its premiere at Covent Garden

The Soviets put into orbit the first space station, Salyut 1, but the crew of three die on returning to earth

With support from Moscow, Erich Honecker takes Walter Ulbricht's place as leader of East Germany

Ian Paisley and others in northern Ireland form the Democratic Unionist Party, as the intransigent wing of Ulster Unionism

Gerry Adams is imprisoned for suspected IRA links but is released for lack of evidence

Internment without trial, reintroduced in Ulster to deal with the developing crisis, is used at first only against Catholics suspected of terrorism

British artist David Hockney paints a striking triple portrait in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar is staged a year after being released as a record

95-year-old Spanish cellist Pablo Casals conducts in New York his Hymn to the United Nations

British paratroops open fire on a civil rights march in Derry, killing thirteen, in what becomes known as Bloody Sunday

The British government suspends the parliament at Stormont and imposes direct rule from Westminster

The SALT 1 treaty is signed by the US and USSR, limiting anti-ballistic missiles

Ultimos Ritos ('Last Rites'), an oratorio by John Tavener, has its first performance in Haarlem in the Netherlands

Bernardo Bertolucci directs Marlon Brando in the sexually explicit film Last Tango in Paris

Jean-Marie Le Pen founds a neo-Fascist party in France, the National Front

Spanish director Luis Buñuel satirizes social conventions in his film Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Peter Maxwell Davies's opera Taverneris performed at Covent Garden

Eleven Israeli athletes are killed by Palestinian 'Black September' terrorists at the Munich Olympic Games

English dramatist Caryl Churchill's first play, Owners, is produced in London

English poet James Fenton publishes his first collection, Terminal Moraine

Russian composer Alfred Schnittke's First Symphony alarms the Soviet authorities and is denied a Moscow premiere

Prime minister Jack Lynch leads Ireland into the European Community

British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher publishes an influential economic tract, Small is Beautiful

The career of virtuoso cellist Jacqueline du Pré's is cut short by multiple sclerosis

The first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, an exposé of Stalin's labour camps, is published in Paris