Like celebrities in Daniel Boorstin’s celebrated definition, some years – 1066, 1492, 1914 – are famous for being famous. Just published is Christopher Lee’s 1603: A Turning Point in British History, which follows John Wills’s Global History of 1688. James Chandler’s magisterial ‘commentary on a moment in the history of a literary culture’, England in 1819, repeats for its title that of a Shelley sonnet reflecting on the state of the nation in the year of the Peterloo massacre. Freezing the chronological progression of ‘history’ at an arbitrarily constructed ‘moment of time’, date-based literary histories allow a detailed consideration of how texts relate to their contexts.