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The Augustan Age begins in English literature, claiming comparison with the equivalent flowering under Augustus Caesar
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The Tatler launches a new style of journalism in Britain's coffee houses, followed two years later by the Spectator
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Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock introduces a delicate vein of mock-heroic in English poetry
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Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence that grows into the longest novel in the English language
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Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language
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English historian Edward Gibbon, sitting among ruins in Rome, conceives the idea of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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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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Richard Brinsley Sheridan's second play, The School for Scandal, is an immediate success in London's Drury Lane theatre
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English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes a passionately feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from Oxford university for circulating a pamphlet with the title The Necessity of Atheism
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Two of Jane Austen's novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are published in the year after her death
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English author Thomas De Quincey publishes his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
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English author Thomas Babington Macaulay publishes a collection of stirring ballads, Lays of Ancient Rome
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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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Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research
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Mrs Henry Wood published her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas
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English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins develops a new verse form that he calls 'sprung rhythm'
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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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Explorer and orientalist Richard Burton begins publication of his multi-volume translation from the Arabic of The Arabian Nights
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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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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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Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell complete a work of mathematical logic, Principia Mathematica
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Robert Graves published his first book of poems, Over the Brazier
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In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes published a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany
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Virginia Woolf published her novel Mrs Dalloway, in which the action is limited to a single day
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Virginia Woolf uses a Hebridean holiday as the setting for her narrative in To The Lighthouse
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Evelyn Waugh succeeds with a comic first novel, Decline and Fall
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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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John Maynard Keynes defines his economics in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
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Christopher Fry's verse drama The Lady's Not For Burning engages in high-spirited poetic word play
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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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Irish dramatist Brendan Behan's play The Hostage is produced in Dublin
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British author Doris Lessing publishes an influential feminist novel, The Golden Notebook
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English dramatist Caryl Churchill's first play, Owners, is produced in London
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English author Ruth Prawer Jhabwala wins the Booker Prize with her novel Heat and Dust
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British economist Nicholas Kaldor attacks monetarism in The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher
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English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot
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English poets John Fuller and James Fenton collaborate in a volume of satirical poems, Partingtime Hall
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English poet Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats deals openly with AIDS
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The poems forming Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters describe his relationship with Sylvia Plath