War Music is the first instalment of Christopher Logue's version of the Iliad

Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children uses the moment of India's independence to launch an adventure in magic realism

English author Anita Brookner publishes her first novel, A Start in Life

Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off opens in London's West end

British economist Nicholas Kaldor attacks monetarism in The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher

Ronald Harwood's play The Dresser is partly inspired by the British actor Donald Wolfit

English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot

British Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah publishes his second collection as The Dread Affair

English poets John Fuller and James Fenton collaborate in a volume of satirical poems, Partingtime Hall

Talking Heads, a series of dramatic monologues by English author Alan Bennett, is broadcast on British TV

Ayatollah Khomeini declares a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses

British physicist Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos for the general reader in A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes

Racing Demon launches a trilogy on the British establishment by English playwright David Hare

Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III is performed at the National Theatre in London

Regeneration is the first volume of English author Pat Barker's trilogy of novels set during World War I

English poet Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats deals openly with AIDS

English novelist Sebastian Faulks publishes Birdsong, set partly in the trenches of World War I

Vikram Seth publishes his novel A Suitable Boy, a family saga in post-independence India

Scottish author Irvine Welsh publishes his first novel, Trainspotting

Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Cephalonia

The poems forming Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters describe his relationship with Sylvia Plath

A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark

The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials

In his novel Atonement Ian McEwan follows the disasters resulting from a child's mistaken identity of a supposed rapist , through to the child's attempt, more than sixty years later, at atonement