English poet Thomas Gray publishes his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard

Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language

Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception

Fingal, supposedly by the medieval Celtic poet Ossian, has a huge and fashionable success but is revealed to be a forgery by James Macpherson

James Boswell meets Samuel Johnson for the first time, in the London bookshop of Thomas Davies

English historian Edward Gibbon, sitting among ruins in Rome, conceives the idea of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

English author Horace Walpole provides an early taste of Gothic thrills in his novel Castle of Otranto

A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland begins publication of the immensely successful Encyclopaedia Britannica

17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, later hailed as a significant poet, commits suicide in a London garret

Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer is produced in London's Covent Garden theatre

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell undertake a journey together to the western islands of Scotland

Encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine emigrates to America and settles in Philadelphia

English historian Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Scottish economist Adam Smith analyzes the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations

Richard Brinsley Sheridan's second play, The School for Scandal, is an immediate success in London's Drury Lane theatre

William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page etched and illustrated by himself

In his Principles Jeremy Bentham defines 'utility' as that which enhances pleasure and reduces pain

Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, a blistering attack on recent events across the Channel

Scottish poet Robert Burns publishes Tam o' Shanter, in which a drunken farmer has an alarming encounter with witches

Thomas Paine publishes the first part of The Rights of Man, his reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes a passionately feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Thomas Paine moves hurriedly to France, to escape a charge of treason in England for opinions expressed in his Rights of Man

William Blake's volume Songs of Innocence and Experience includes his poem 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright'

Thomas Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason, an attack on conventional Christianity

Samuel Taylor Coleridge says that while writing Kubla Khan he is interrupted by 'a person on business from Porlock'