Famous writers

William Shakespeare - arguably the most famous writer in the world.

Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne), Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Dickens.

Famous Poets

Lord Byron, Robert Burns, and Thomas Hardy.

Famous Composers

William Byrd , Thomas Tallis , John Taverner , Henry Purcell , Edward Elgar, Arthur Sullivan , Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Benjamin Britten.

The Greatest Britons

The Greatest Britons of all Time
chosen by the people of Britain.

In November 2002, the British public voted to find the Greatest Briton of all time. Over a million people voted.

NB. The list contains a few non British entrants includinding two Irish nationals (Bono and Bob Geldof) and Freddie Mercury, who was born in Zanzibar to Indian Parsi parents.

Here are the results:

Sir Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was a politician, a soldier, an artist, and the 20th century's most famous and celebrated Prime Minister.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was an extraordinary Victorian engineer. He designed and
built amongst other structures bridges, ships, railways and viaducts
Diana, Princess of Wales
From the time of her marriage to the Prince of Wales in 1981 until her death in a car accident in Paris in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales was one of the world's most high-profile, most photographed, and most iconic celebrities.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was a British naturalist of the nineteenth century. He and others developed the theory of evolution. This theory forms the basis for the modern life sciences. Darwin's most famous books are 'The Origin of Species' and 'The Descent of Man'.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was a playwright and poet whose body of works is considered the greatest in English literature. He wrote dozens of plays which continue to dominate world theater 400 years later.
Sir Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton was a mathematician and scientist who invented differential calculus and formulated the theory of universal gravitation, a theory about the nature of light, and three laws of motion.
Queen Elizabeth I
The daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth 1 reigned England from 1558–1603. Her reign was marked by several plots to overthrow her, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1587), the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588), and domestic prosperity and literary achievement.
Find out more about Elizabeth 1

Sir Alexander Graham Bell
Scottish-born American inventor of the telephone.
and The Sound of Music (1965).
Sir Edward Elgar
Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
George Harrison
Sir David Attenborough
James Connolly
George Stephenson
Sir Charlie Chaplin
Tony Blair
William Caxton
Bobby Moore
Jane Austen
William Booth
King Henry V
Aleister Crowley
King Robert the Bruce
Bob Geldof
The Unknown Warrior
Robbie Williams
Edward Jenner
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd George
Charles Babbage
Geoffrey Chaucer
King Richard III
J.K. Rowling -
James Watt
Sir Richard Branson
Bono (Born in Ireland)
John Lydon (Johnny Rotten)
Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
Donald Campbell
King Henry II
James Clerk Maxwell
J.R.R. Tolkien
Sir Walter Raleigh
King Edward I
Sir Barnes Wallis
Richard Burton
Tony Benn
David Livingstone
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Marie Stopes
John Logie Baird
A Scottish inventor, who in 1926 gave the first demonstration of true television

Khalil Gibran
Khalil Gibran was a Lebanese American artist, writer, philosopher and the third most popular poet in history after Shakespeare and Laozi. Born in an ...

George Elliot
Mary Ann (Marian) Evans, more popular by her pen name George Eliot, was one of the most acclaimed English novelists of the Victorian era.

Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy was a Russia born writer and poet and is regarded as the world's greatest poet and novelist

Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author, essayist, lecturer and humorist who wrote a series of famous books
T S Eliot
Tomas Stearns Eliot, often shorten as T. S. Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic and a Nobel Prize winner for his exceptional work in the world

Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was an English writer, author and novelist and a pioneer of modernism in English literature. Among her most famous work are novels To the

Ibn Tahir al-Baghdadi (980, Baghdad, Iraq - 1037, ? )
He wrote about different systems of arithmetic in a work of great importance in the history of mathematics.
Ibn Al-Baitar (1197, Malaga, Spain - 1248, Damascus, Syria)
One of the greatest scientists of Muslim Spain and was a great botanist and pharmacist of the Middle Ages.
Ibn Bajjah ( ?, Saragossa, Spain - 1138, Fez, Morocco)
He had a vast knowledge of medicine, mathematics and astronomy. His main contribution to early Islamic philosophy is his idea on Soul Phenomenology, but unfortunately not completed. He was also the teacher of Ibn Rushd.
Ibn al-Banna (1256, Marrakesh, Morocco - 1321, Marrakesh, Morocco)
He wrote a large number of works including an algebra text, an introduction to Euclid's Elements, and various works on astronomy. He introduced a mathematical notation for algebra and fractions.

Al-Battani (850, Harran, Turkey - 929, Qasr al-Jiss, Iraq)
His best-known achievement was the determination of the solar year as being 365 days, 5 hours, 46 minutes and 24 seconds.
He was able to correct some of Ptolemy's results and compiled new tables of the Sun and Moon, long accepted as authoritative, discovered the movement of the Sun's apogee, treated the division of the celestial sphere, and introduced, probably independently of the 5th century Indian astronomer Aryabhata, the use of sines in calculation, and partially that of tangents, forming the basis of modern trigonometry. His most important work is the Kitāb al-zīğ (Arabic: كتاب الزيج "the book of tables ).
Nur ad-Din al-Betrugi (Alpetragius) (?, Morocco - 1204, Seville, Spain)
He was an Arab astronomer and philosopher of the Middle Ages. Born in present-day Morocco, he settled in Seville, in Al-Andalus. The Alpetragius crater on the Moon is named after him
Haly Abenragel (Abû l-Hasan 'Alî ibn Abî l-Rijâl) (? - 1037, Kairouan, Tunisia)
He was an Arab astrologer of the late 10th and early 11th century, best known for his Kitāb al-bāri' fi akhām an-nujūm.
Al-Hajjāj ibn Yūsuf ibn Matar (786 – 833)
An Arab mathematician.