Part 1. Anglo-Saxon and Medieval ; Geoffrey Chaucer ; Edmund Spenser ; William Shakespeare ; Ben Jonson ; Jacobean Prose ; Robert Herrick ; John Milton ; Andrew Marvell ; John Aubrey ; John Dryden ; Jonathan Swift ; Ambrose Philips ; Edward Young ; Alexander Pope ; Samuel Richardson ; Lord Chesterfield ; Samuel Johnson ; Eighteenth-century verse ; Thomas Gray ; Thomas Percy ; George Crabbe ; William Blake ; Robert Burns ; William Cobbett ; William Wordsworth ; Sir Walter Scott ; Samuel Taylor Coleridge ; Thomas Moore ; Leigh Hunt ; Lord Byron ; Thomas Hood ; Ralph Waldo Emerson ; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; Edgar Allan Poe ; Martin Tupper ; Charles Dickens ; Robert Browning ; Edward Lear ; Walt Whitman ; Matthew Arnold ; William Johnson Cory ; Dante Gabriel Rossetti ; Emily Dickinson ; William Morris ; Bret Harte ; Algernon Charles Swinburne ; Henry Kendall ; Thomas Hardy ; Henry James ; Arthur O'Shaughnessy ; Gerard Manley Hopkins ; Edmund Gosse ; Oscar Wilde ; A.E. Housman ; Arthur Conan Doyle ; Henry Newbolt ; W.B. Yeats ; Rudyard Kipling ; American popular fiction, c.1900 ; Hilaire Belloc ; W.H. Davies ; Bertrand Russell ; G.K. Chesterton ; Robert Frost ; Gertrude Stein ; John Buchan ; Lytton Strachey ; James Joyce ; Virginia Woolf ; A.A. Milne ; William Carlos Williams ; D.H. Lawrence ; Marianne Moore ; Edith Sitwell ; T.S. Eliot ; Raymond Chandler ; Agatha Christie ; Cole Porter ; Edna St. Vincent Millay ; Aldous Huxley ; Ernest Hemingway ; Graham Greene ; Nancy Mitford ; Anthony Powell ; John Betjeman ; Clifford Odets ; W.H. Auden ; Ian Fleming ; Stephen Spender ; Lawrence Durrell ; R.S. Thomas ; Dylan Thomas ; Roald Dahl ; Robert Lowell ; Muriel Spark ; Iris Murdoch ; Richard Wilbur ; Philip Larkin ; Jack Kerouac ; Allen Ginsberg ; Ted Hughes ; Sylvia Plath ; Leonard Cohen ; Thomas Pynchon ; Seamus Heaney ; Clive James ; J.M. Coetzee ; Craig Raine ; Julian Barnes ; David Hare ; Ian McEwan ; Martin Amis ; J.K. Rowling
Part 2. From the wider world
Nursery rhymes
Tories and radicals
The young Jane Austen
Ripostes
Alice
James Joyce as parodist
Composites
Stage and screen
Artistic endeavours
The written word
Drayneflete
Affairs of state
The Sokal hoax
Two tributes
A mixed assembly.