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“... great Ring Main, a kind of H2O M25. The supply began with individual enterprise when, around 1600, Edmund Colthurst, an Elizabethan man of parts, sought royal approval of his plans. By 1605, it was seen rather as a matter of public service, and an Act of Parliament authorised the City to do the necessary work. Four years later it returned to private ...”

“... the Late Victorian period.’ Manning’s high repute was shattered by his first biographer, Edmund Sheridan Purcell, a Catholic journalist, who maintained that he had been appointed by the Cardinal as ‘official biographer’. There was nothing in writing to this effect, and Mr Gray describes the claim as ‘at best a half-truth’. Manning did, it is ...”

“... embarked on a moderate constitutional revolution not unlike England’s Whig Revolution of 1688. Edmund Burke, an early doomsayer in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), was out of step with the optimism of his contemporaries. As Uglow reminds us, the prime minister throughout the first phase of the wars, William Pitt the Younger, wasn’t the ...”

“... to fight against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease’. The ‘great god Gordon’ Lameyer, a tall, handsome, American-jawed – I might as well say it – hunk, arrived in spring 1953, along with acceptances of three poems by Harper’s (though they didn’t take ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’), and the news that she had won a stint as ...”

“... in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is no paradox to ...”

“... 18th birthday, he had published a learned edition with Cambridge. It won laudatory reviews from Edmund Gosse, George Saintsbury and others. Surely a future stretched ahead in which Sparrow was destined to be a great scholar and man of letters, perhaps a good minor poet? Who could have predicted that when this learned and precocious adolescent had become an ...”

“... excavated by a distinguished group of historians, including Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock, offered a compelling account of the reasons British Americans broke with monarchy and then embarked on such a distinctive constitutional experiment, hedged with an idiosyncratic Bill of Rights. For example, the curiously tangled ...”

“... thought (‘no single idea seems to last for more than a couple of bars’); and the jaw drops at Edmund Rubbra’s ‘rhythmic monotony and … melodic paucity’, criticisms Rubbra might just as well, or ill, have made of Schoenberg, Webern and their assorted followers (including Lambert’s friends Humphrey Searle and Elisabeth Lutyens), whose work ...”

“... Life of Mansfield contains at least one palpable fabrication. In the 20th century two scholars, Edmund Heward and C.H.S. Fifoot, produced good short biographies focused on Mansfield as a lawmaker; and James Oldham (the author of the excellent entry on Mansfield in the current DNB), with new access to a large cache of Mansfield’s trial notes, produced a ...”

“... existed. This world was Q’s cave: a warm, amateurish, freshly-dug hideout in which, say, G.S. Gordon, when he succeeded Walter Raleigh as Merton Professor of English at Oxford, ‘was said to have got the job largely on the strength of his Lit Supp contributions’. In that first year of the TLS’s existence, The Wings of the Dove was reviewed by ...”

“... Monticello, had experienced a substantial increase in visitor numbers after the historian Annette Gordon-Reed established beyond doubt the Hemings connection. In the apparent belief that visitors’ imaginations need to be stirred even further, a room at Monticello next to Jefferson’s bedroom is now identified as Hemings’s living quarters, although the ...”

“... largely Southern materials, he stitches together the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver ...”

“... clearly as a group, or so hilariously as a palsied social tribe. There’s the horrible bookseller Edmund Curll, Pope’s enemy of twenty years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of ...”

“... mistakes by rubbing their noses across the blackboard – was later portrayed as the hateful Mr Gordon in Of Human Bondage. It wasn’t all bad, however. Quite soon, Maugham was spotted by the new headmaster and began to win prizes, and to acquire a reputation for caustic wit. As with a subsequent generation of writers, spies and homosexuals (all of which ...”

“... epitaph on William the Silent: ‘When he cried, the little children died in the streets.’ Edmund Burke was accused by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine of putting it on in his lament for Marie Antoinette, but Burke protested that he had wept as he wrote and that the tears had ‘wetted my paper’. In any case, Wollstonecraft herself had been moved to ...”