-
Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the church and the English people
-
Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mixing the legends of Scandinavia with the English experience of the Angles and Saxons.
-
Eddas material, which takes shape in Iceland, derived from earlier sources in Norway, Great Britain, and Burgundy.
-
Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later gives humanists the name Dunsman or dunce
-
William of Ockham advocates reducing arguments to the essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor
-
A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins Piers Plowman's epic poem.
-
Chaucer begins an ambitious plan for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he only turns 24 at the time of his death
-
William Tyndale studies at the University of Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English
-
Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, features the shocking blank verse from the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
-
Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both Renaissance ideals and disappointment in a less confident era
-
John Smith publishes A Description of New England, a review of his exploration of the region in 1614
-
Lycidas by John Milton is published in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King
-
John Locke publishes his Essay on Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience
-
Henry Fielding introduces a character of lasting appeal in the scruffy but kind-hearted Tom Jones
-
17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, who was later hailed as a leading poet, commits suicide in a London garret.
-
Thomas Paine publishes his complete Age of Reason, an attack on conventional Christianity.
-
William Cobbett returns the bones of Thomas Paine, who died in the USA, back to England. USA In 1809
-
London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his thesaurus, thesaurus for English words and phrases.
-
English author George Eliot gains fame with his first full-length novel, Adam Bede
-
El artista y autor francés George du Maurier publica su novela Trilby
-
Rudyard Kipling publishes Just So Stories for Little Children
-
James Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins a serial publication in a London newspaper, The Egoist.
-
Henry Williamson gained wide readership with Tarka the Otter, a realistic story of the life and death of an otter in Devon
-
John Maynard Keynes defines his economy in the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
-
Kingsley Amis and other young writers in Britain were seen as Angry Young Men
-
British author Roald Dahl publishes a children's novel, James and the Giant Peach
-
Iris Murdoch publishes The Sea, the Sea and wins the 1978 Booker Prize
-
English author Julian Barnes publishes a multifaceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot
• 1994 -
Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Kefalonia
-
Michael Frayn's play in Copenhagen dramatizes Werner Heisenberg's visit to Niels Bohr in Denmark during the war
