Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off opens in London's West end

Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona is sold to Barcelona for a new record fee of £5 million, almost double the highest previous figure

British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, promoter of the punk style, shows a collection called Punkature

US fillm actress Grace Kelly is killed in a car accident in Monte Carlo

CDU leader Helmut Kohl follows Helmut Schmidt as chancellor of Germany

The trade union movement Solidarnośc (Solidarity) is declared illegal by the Polish government

After 18 years as General Secretary of the Communist party in the USSR, Leonid Brezhnev dies in office

British economist Nicholas Kaldor attacks monetarism in The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher

Ronald Harwood's play The Dresser is partly inspired by the British actor Donald Wolfit

Philips and Sony jointly introduce a new device, the compact disc

Rudolf Nureyev begins a successful 6-year period as artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet

Polish union leader and activist Lech Walesa is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

Olivier Messiaen's opera St Francis of Assisi has its premiere in Paris

Luc Montagnier, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, discovers a new human retrovirus that he names LAV (later changed to HIV)

British skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean earn a perfect score for their Bolero programme in the Sarajevo winter Olympics

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and union leader Arthur Scargill begin a bitter personal struggle in the miners' strike

Czech novelist Milan Kundera publishes The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in the tradition of magic realism

English athlete Daley Thompson sets an Olympic and world record in the decathlon at the Los Angeles Olympics

Diego Maradona is sold to Napoli for a new record fee of about £5 million, two years after being sold to Barcelona for £3 million

English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot

British architects James Stirling and Michael Wilford complete a new art gallery for Stuttgart

Republican activist Gerry Adams is elected president of Sinn Fein

Genetic (or DNA) fingerprinting is invented and developed by British geneticist Alec Jeffreys

Luciano Berio's opera Un re in ascolto has its premiere in Salzburg

Ian Botham is the first player to achieve the double triple, with a total of more than 3000 runs and 300 wickets in Test cricket