US choreographer William Forsythe becomes director of the Frankfurt Ballet

Bob Geldof forms Band Aid and releases for Ethiopian famine relief the best-selling UK single Do they know its Christmas?

The miners' strike, ending after eleven bitter months, proves a turning point in the struggle between Margaret Thatcher and the unions

New Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev brings glasnost ('openness') and perestroika ('reform') to the USSR

17-year-old German tennis-player Boris Becker becomes the youngest ever to win the men's singles at Wimbledon

Live Aid, an all-day concert for famine relief in Africa, is held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia

US artist Christo tightly binds Paris's Pont Neuf in fabric, as one of his international series of wrapped iconic buildings

French racing driver Alain Prost wins the first of his four Formula One titles

22-year-old Gary Kasparov defeats Anatoly Karpov and becomes the youngest-ever world champion in chess

Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Ireland's Garret FitzGerald sign an Anglo-Irish Agreement to tackle shared problems

British Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah publishes his second collection as The Dread Affair

The Soviets launch the first module (the living quarters) of their Mir Space Station

Swedish prime minister Olof Palme is killed in a Stockholm street in an unsolved murder

Tony Cragg's Raleigh is unveiled outside the Tate Gallery in his home town of Liverpool

A Soviet nuclear power station explodes at Chernobyl, scattering radioactive material over a wide area

Harrison Birtwistle's second opera, The Mask of Orpheus, brings him an international reputation

Mad Cow Disease (BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy ) is identified and described in Britain

Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki's opera The Black Mask is premiered in Salzburg

English poets John Fuller and James Fenton collaborate in a volume of satirical poems, Partingtime Hall

18-year-old German tennis player Steffi Graf deposes Martina Navratilova as world no. 1

Talking Heads, a series of dramatic monologues by English author Alan Bennett, is broadcast on British TV

Sylvie Guillem and Laurent Hilaire dance in the Paris premiere of William Forsythe's In the middle somewhat elevated

US architect Daniel Libeskind designs the City Edge project in Berlin, building it up from startlingly fragmented forms

British golfer Nick Faldo wins the first of three victories in six years in the British Open

Ayatollah Khomeini declares a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses