BBC Radio Three is currently broadcasting a fascinating series on the "50 key works" of classical music. This is a spin-off from Howard Goodall's BBC2 television series and its tie-in book, The Story of Music (Chatto), and it crystallises – for the amateur listener – the turning points in the evolution of the classical tradition in the most enthralling way. Did you, for instance, know that Procul Harum's Whiter Shade of Pale contains a harmonic line that is pure Bach?

So much for music. Following Radio 3, I've found myself speculating about the 50 key moments in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Arguably, Goodall's very good idea works almost as well for the history of the printed page.

Note: what follows is not merely a book list, but an attempt to identify some of the hinge moments in our literature – a composite of significant events, notable poems, plays, and novels, plus influential deaths, starting with the violent death of Shakespeare's one serious rival …

1. The death of Christopher Marlowe (1593)



2. William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (1609)



3. The King James Bible (1611)



4. William Shakespeare: The First Folio (1623)



5. John Milton: Areopagitica (1644)



6. Samuel Pepys: The Diaries (1660-69)



7. John Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress (1678)



8. John Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)



9. William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)



10. Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)



11. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels (1727)



12. Samuel Johnson: A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)



13. Thomas Jefferson: The American Declaration of Independence (1776)



14. James Boswell: Life of Johnson (1791)



15. Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography (1793)



16. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)



17. William Wordsworth: "The Prelude" (1805)



18. Jane Austen: Pride & Prejudice (1813)



19. Lord Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812)



20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism (1818)



21. Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The American Scholar" (1837)



22. Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution (1837)



23. The uniform Penny Post (1840)



24. Thomas Hood: "The Song of the Shirt" (1843)



25. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (1847)



26. Charles Dickens: David Copperfield (1849)



27. Herman Melville: Moby Dick (1851)



28. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1855)



29. Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species (1859)



30. Henry Thoreau: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)



31. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)



32. Lewis Carroll: Alice In Wonderland (1865)



33. Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)



34. First commercially successful typewriter, USA. (1878)



35. George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871)



36. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)



37. Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)



38. Thomas Hardy: Poems (c.1900)



39. JM Barrie: Peter Pan (1904)



40. James Joyce: Ulysses (1922)



41. TS Eliot: The Waste Land (1922)



42. F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)



43. George Orwell: George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

(1949)



44. Ian Fleming: Casino Royale (1953)



45. Jack Kerouac: On The Road (1957)



46. Maurice Sendak: Where The Wild Things Are (1963)



47. Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (1966)



48. WG Sebald: Vertigo (1990)



49. The launch of Amazon.com (1994)



50. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)



Plus a bonus book - Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters (1998)

This catalogue, in conclusion, is highly partisan and impressionistic. It makes no claim to be comprehensive (how could it?). Rather, it aims to stimulate a discussion about the turning-points in the world of books and letters from the King James Bible to the present day.

Over to you.