-
731
The Venerable Bede
The Venerable Bede, in his monastery at jarrow,completes his history of the English church and people -
800
Beowulf
Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons -
950
Eddas
The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy -
1300
Duns Scotus
Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce -
1340
William of Ockham
William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor -
1367
William Langland
A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman -
1387
Chaucer
Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death -
1469
Thomas Malory
Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur -
1549
Thomas Cranmer
The first version of the English prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer -
Marlowe
Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama -
Edmund Spenser
English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene -
Shakespeare
Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident a -
Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I -
David Hume
David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science -
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception -
Edwar Gibbon
English historian Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -
William Blake
William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page etched and illustrated by himself -
Walter Scott
Walter Scott publishes The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the long romantic poem that first brings him fame -
John Keats
English poet John Keats publishes Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden -
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels -
Henry Wood
Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas -
Oxford University press
Oxford University Press publishes the A volume of its New English Dictionary, which will take 37 years to reach Z -
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad publishes his novel Lord Jim about a life of failure and redemption in the far East -
Jean Rhys
Caribbean-born author Jean Rhys publishes her first novel, Postures, based on her affair with the writer Ford Madox Ford -
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf publishes the most fluid of her novels, The Waves, in which she tells the story through six interior monologues -
Rebecca West
British author Rebecca West publishes an account of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon -
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl publishes a fantasy treat for a starving child, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -
Julian Barnes
English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot -
Stephen Hawking
British physicist Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos for the general reader in A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes -
Sebastian Faulks
English novelist Sebastian Faulks publishes Birdsong, set partly in the trenches of World War I -
Michael Frayn
Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark -
2000
The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials
