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In his monastery at Jarrow, completes his historyof the English church and people
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The first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experiencein England of Angles and Saxons
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Taking shappe of Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy.
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Knows as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce
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Advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's razor
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A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman
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The courtly poem Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur
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Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient troy.
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Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death.
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In gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur - an English account of the French tales of King Arthur
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Take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Cristian humanism
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Plans to translate the Bible into english
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The first version of the English prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer
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Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months
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Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
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Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age.
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James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years
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Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I.
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Shakespeare's last completed play, The Tempest, is performed
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William Shakespeare dies at New Place, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is buried in Holy Trinity Church
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They publish thirty-six Shakespeare plays in the First Folio
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The poems of Massachusetts author Anne Bradstreet are published in London under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
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Devoted fisherman Izaak Walton publishes the classic work on the subject, The Compleat Angler.
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Paradise Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10
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Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress, written during John Bunyan's two spells in Bedford Gaol, is published and is immediately popular
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Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African slave trade
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John Locke publishes his Essay concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience
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25-year-old George Berkeley attacks Locke in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
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Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel
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Sends his hero on a series of bitterly satirical travels in Gulliver's Travels
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English poet Thomas Gray publishes his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard.
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Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language
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Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception
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A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland begins publication of the immensely successful Encyclopaedia Britannica
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English historian Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page etched and illustrated by himself
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Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, a blistering attack on recent events across the Channel
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Thomas Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason, an attack on conventional Christianity.
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Walter Scott publishes The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the long romantic poem that first brings him fame
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Walter Scott's poem Lady of the Lake brings tourists in unprecedented numbers to Scotland's Loch Katrine
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Pride and Prejudice, based on a youthful work of 1797 called First Impressions, is the second of Jane Austen's novels to be published
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Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes probably his best-known poem, the sonnet Ozymandias
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Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a Gothic tale about giving life to an artificial man
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24-year-old Charles Dickens begins monthly publication of his first work of fiction, Pickwick Papers (published in book form in 1837)
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Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838)
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English poet Robert Browning publishes a vivid narrative poem about the terrible revenge of The Pied Piper of Hamelin
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Ebenezer Scrooge mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol
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In his novel Coningsby Benjamin Disraeli develops the theme of Conservatism uniting 'two nations', the rich and the poor
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English author William Makepeace Thackeray begins publication of his novel Vanity Fair in monthly parts (book form 1848)
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Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels
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London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases
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Edward FitzGerald publishes The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, romantic translations of the work of the Persian poet
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Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research
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English author George Eliot wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bede
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Tennyson publishes the first part of Idylls of the King, a series of linked poems about Britain's mythical king Arthur
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Charles Dickens publishes his French Revolution novel, A Tale of Two Cities
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Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas
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English author Charles Kingsley publishes an improving fantasy for young children, The Water-Babies
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Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlier
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Algernon Swinburne scandalizes Victorian Britain with his first collection, Poems and Ballads
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The first volume of Das Kapital is completed by Marx in London and is published in Hamburg
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English author Matthew Arnold publishes Culture and Anarchy, an influential collection of essays about contemporary society
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Lewis Carroll publishes Through the Looking Glass, a second story of Alice's adventures
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William Gladstone's pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors, protesting at massacre by the Turks, sells 200,000 copies within a month
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The Aesthetic Movement and 'art for art's sake', attitudes personified above all by Whistler and Wilde, are widely mocked and satirized in Britain
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Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure story, Treasure Island, features Long John Silver and Ben Gunn
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Oxford University Press publishes the A volume of its New English Dictionary, which will take 37 years to reach Z
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Explorer and orientalist Richard Burton begins publication of his multi-volume translation from the Arabic of The Arabian Nights
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Robert Louis Stevenson introduces a dual personality in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
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Thomas Hardy publishes his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with the future mayor, Michael Henchard selling his wife and child at a fair
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Sherlock Holmes features in Conan Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet
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Scottish anthropologist James Frazer publishes The Golden Bough, a massive compilation of contemporary knowledge about ritual and religious custom
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Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book surrounds the child Mowgli with a collection of vivid animal guardians
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H.G. Wells publishes The Time Machine, a story about a Time Traveller whose first stop on his journey is the year 802701
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English author Bram Stoker publishes Dracula, his gothic tale of vampirism in Transylvania
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H.G. Wells publishes his science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, in which Martians arrive in a rocket to invade earth
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E. Nesbit publishes The Story of the Treasure Seekers, introducing the Bastable family who feature in several of her books for children
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Beatrix Potter publishes at her own expense The Tale of Peter Rabbit
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The Tale of Peter Rabbit is published commercially, a year after being first printed by Beatrix Potter at her own expense
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Joseph Conrad publishes his novel Nostromo, about a revolution in South America and a fatal horde of silver
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J.M Barrie's play for children Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up has its premiere in London
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The heroine of H.G. Wells' novel Ann Veronica is a determined example of the New Woman
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The Times Literary Supplement is published in London as an independent paper, separate from The Times
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In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes publishes a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany
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Christopher Robin features for the first time in A.A. Milne's When We Were Very Young.
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Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and the others make their first appearance in A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh.
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Swallows and Amazons is the first of Arthur Ransome's adventure stories for children
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US poet Archibald MacLeish publishes a narrative epic, Conquistador, about the conquest of Mexico
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In Down and Out in Paris and London English author George Orwell writes a sympathetic account of the people he meets on hard times
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British publisher Allen Lane launches a paperback series to which he gives the name Penguin Books
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British author Evelyn Waugh publishes a classic Fleet Street novel, Scoop, introducing Lord Copper, proprietor of The Beast
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British author Rebecca West publishes an account of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
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James Bond, agent 007, has a licence to kill in Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale.
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Politician and author Winston Churchill completes his six-volume history The Second World War
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William Golding gives a chilling account of schoolboy savagery in his first novel, Lord of the Flies
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British philologist J.R.R. Tolkien publishes the third and final volume of his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings
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British author Roald Dahl publishes a novel for children, James and the Giant Peach
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Anthony Burgess publishes A Clockwork Orange, a novel depicting a disturbing and violent near-future.
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Roald Dahl publishes a fantasy treat for a starving child, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
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German-born British art historian Nikolaus Pevsner completes his monumental 46-volume Buildings of England
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British physicist Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos for the general reader in A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes.
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A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
