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In his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people
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The first great work of Germanic Literature, mingles the legends of scandinavia with the experience in england of angles and Saxon.
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Taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy.
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Known 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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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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William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English.
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The Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be followed by the complete Bible in 1588
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After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III
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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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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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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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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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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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English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes a passionately feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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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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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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Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research
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Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell, on a boat trip, a story about her own adventures in Wonderland
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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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Lewis Carroll publishes Through the Looking Glass, a second story of Alice's adventures
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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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Oscar Wilde publishes his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the ever-youthful hero's portrait grows old and ugly
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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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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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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 English writer Virginia Woolf publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out
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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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Virginia Woolf publishes the most fluid of her novels, The Waves, in which she tells the story through six interior monologues
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George Orwell reveals the harsh realities of contemporary British life in The Road to Wigan Pier
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C.S. Lewis gives the first glimpse of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
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Politician and author Winston Churchill completes his six-volume history The Second World War
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Anthony Burgess publishes A Clockwork Orange, a novel depicting a disturbing and violent near-future
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Iris Murdoch publishes The Sea, the Sea, and wins the 1978 Booker Prize
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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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Scottish author Irvine Welsh publishes his first novel, Trainspotting
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A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
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Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark
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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials
