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“... were only dimly apprehended and were largely discounted. This was notably true of O’Connell, and Chenevix Trench’s book puts it bluntly enough: ‘The north was terra incognita to [O’Connell]: he hardly ever set foot there, and on one spectacularly unsuccessful visit narrowly escaped ambush by booking coach-horses for one day and arriving, under a ...”

“... historical characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy ...”

“... power) of a new Norman elite. The scene comes from The English Language, published in 1949 by Charles Leslie Wrenn, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Wrenn was one of many scholars for whom the history of English after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”