German racing driver Michael Schumacher wins his first world championship title in Formula One

The collapse of Sylvio Berlusconi's coaltion brings to an end his short-lived first period as Italy's prime minister

Potholers discover the world's oldest known paintings in the Chauvet cave in southern France

Russian troops enter Chechnya to crush the armed separatist movement

Britain and Argentina come to an agreement concerning the future exploitation of oil around the Falkland Islands

British mathematician Andrew Wiles publishes, in Annals of Mathematics, his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

Jacques Chirac defeats the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, in the French presidential election

British choreographer Matthew Bourne has a great success with his all-male Swan Lake

Bosnian Serbs massacre thousands of Bosnian Muslims after laying siege to the town of Srebrenica

British artist Tracey Emin causes a stir with Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995

The US hosts peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia to end the Bosnian civil war

An IRA bomb at Canary Wharf shatters the fifteen-month ceasefire achieved after the Downing Street Declaration

The Stone of Scone is returned from Westminster to Scotland, exactly seven centuries after its removal by Edward I

Chris Ofili's painting The Holy Virgin is embellished with elephant dung

The British pop group Spice Girls sell millions of their first album, Spice, breaking all previous UK records

The divorce is finalized of Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales

Russian troops withdraw from Grozny after a peace deal that leaves Chechnya with effective autonomy

Irish author Marina Carr's play Portia Coughlin is performed at the Abbey Theatre

A fatal variant CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease) is first identified in Britain, linked to BSE but capable of infecting humans

Dolly the Sheep is cloned in an epoch-making experiment at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh

Tony Blair leads the Labour party to its greatest ever electoral victory, winning 418 seats at Westminster

Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss founds his own ballet company at Holstebro

Irish author Martin McDonagh's play The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the first in a trilogy

Diana, the Princess of Wales, and her friend Dodi Fayed die after a car crash in Paris

The poems forming Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters describe his relationship with Sylvia Plath