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The Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people
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Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons
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The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy
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Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce
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William of Ockham 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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One of four new yeomen of the chamber in Edward III's household is Geoffrey Chaucer
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The courtly poem Sir 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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Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur
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Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism
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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 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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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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Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
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English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene an epic poem with a fantastic allegory that paid homage to the Tudor house and Elizabeth I of England. He is recognized as one of the first architects of modern English verse and is considered one of the best poets in the English language.
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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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William Shakespeare's name appears among the actors in a list of the King's Men
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Ben Jonson escribe The Masque of Blackness, la primera de sus muchas máscaras para la corte de James I
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Shakespeare's sonnets, written ten years previously, are published
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25-year-old George Berkeley attacks Locke in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
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John Smith publishes A Description of New England, an account of his exploration of the region in 1614
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John Donne, England's leading Metaphysical poet, becomes dean of St Paul'
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John Milton's Lycidas is published in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King
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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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John Locke publishes his Essay concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience
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The Augustan Age begins in English literature, claiming comparison with the equivalent flowering under Augustus Caesar
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25-year-old George Berkeley attacks Locke in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
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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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Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel
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David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science
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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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James Boswell meets Samuel Johnson for the first time, in the London bookshop of Thomas Davies
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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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Scottish poet Robert Burns publishes Tam o' Shanter, in which a drunken farmer has an alarming encounter with witches
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Thomas Paine publishes the first part of The Rights of Man, his reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
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Thomas Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason, an attack on conventional Christianity
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English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly publish Lyrical Ballads, a milestone in the Romantic movement
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William Blake includes his poem 'Jerusalem' in the Preface to his book Milton
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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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Two of Jane Austen's novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are published in the year after her death
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English poet John Keats publishes Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden
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English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes Ode to the West Wind, written mainly in a wood near Florence
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English author Thomas De Quincey publishes his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
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Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838)
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English author Thomas Babington Macaulay publishes a collection of stirring ballads, Lays of Ancient Rome
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Ebenezer Scrooge mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol
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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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Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research
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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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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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Lewis Carroll publishes Through the Looking Glass, a second story of Alice's adventures
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English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins develops a new verse form that he calls 'sprung rhythm
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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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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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Somerset Maugham publishes his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, based on the London life he has observed as a medical student
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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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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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Bernard Shaw has two new plays opening in London in the same year, Major Barbara and Man and Superman
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Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell complete a work of mathematical logic, Principia Mathematica
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Robert Graves publishes his first book of poems, Over the Brazier
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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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E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India builds on cultural misconceptions between the British and Indian communities
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Patrick Abercrombie publishes The Preservation of Rural England, calling for rural planning to prevent the encroachment of towns
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Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen publishes her first novel, The Hotel
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English author J.B. Priestley has an immediate success with his first novel, The Good Companions
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English poet Robert Graves puts behind him an England he dislikes in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That
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US poet Archibald MacLeish publishes a narrative epic, Conquistador, about the conquest of Mexico
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British publisher Allen Lane launches a paperback series to which he gives the name Penguin Books
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Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is rejected by numerous publishers before becoming, decades later, his best-known novel
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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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Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American is set in contemporary Vietnam and foresees troubles ahead
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English poet John Betjeman publishes his long autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells
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Roald Dahl publishes a fantasy treat for a starving child, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
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English novelist Paul Scott publishes The Jewel in the Crown, the first volume in his 'Raj Quartet'
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English dramatist Caryl Churchill's first play, Owners, is produced in London
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British economist Nicholas Kaldor attacks monetarism in The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher
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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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Regeneration is the first volume of English author Pat Barker's trilogy of novels set during World War I
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Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Cephalonia
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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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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials