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“... Digit”.’ Appropriately Greene has dream-meetings not only with notable writers (he meets Henry James on a ‘most disagreeable river trip to Bogota’) but with world statesmen, popes and royalty. Several times he is offered, or given, important appointments. In one dream Edward Heath asks him to serve as Ambassador to ...”

“... the settled bourgeoisie; Charlie Chaplin placed his almost diagonally across the top of his head; Edward, Prince of Wales angled his upward, seeming to signify the slippery slope between masculine grace and sexual predation; the sluggers of Bandits’ Roost in New York City tilted their crowns downward almost to eye-level. The fedora, which, at least in the ...”

“... the end of her long career, Braddon had earned a grudging respect from her contemporaries. Henry James acknowledged that her novels were ‘brilliant, lively, ingenious and destitute of a ray of sentiment’. In a letter of 1911 he told her that ‘I used to follow you ardently.’ But after her death Braddon’s reputation declined, along with the ...”

“... idea to translate the ‘Claves Angelicae’, the prayers that Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley wrote in ‘Enochian’, a so-called angelic language, into English.For Ralphs, English is the language of the angels. She walks it back to the Tudor era (‘when [it] was finally settling down a bit’), engaging its odd spellings and ...”

“... niece Anna Lefroy, born Anna Austen in 1793, the eldest child of Jane Austen’s brother James. According to family tradition, the play, though written down by Jane Austen, was not her brainchild. Anna, who knew Grandison as familiarly in youth as her aunt did, was always understood to have devised the play as a child and to have dictated it to Jane ...”

“... Street which Lloyd George attempted to satisfy. It was not until after the 1970 Election, when Edward Heath assumed the premiership, that the Personal Secretariat returned to life in the form of the Central Policy Review Staff, popularly known as the Think Tank. What seems surprising is that Heath’s Think Tank, with a basic staff of only twenty, was not ...”

“... shareholder, Barclays Bank, got £5.2 million. That year, Barclays’ profits were £7.08 billion. Edward Warner Shewell, who did most to get the Mythe waterworks built, was a long-lived Conservative patriarch whose career spanned most of the 19th century. With his wife, Emma, he raised 16 children at their house in Royal Crescent, Cheltenham. For many ...”

“... is still to be found in one of its many forms in thousands of crofters’ living-rooms; James Cameron the Kirkcaldy publisher, whose The Old and the New Highlands (1912) brought the terrible epic up to the time of the sporting estates, the Crofters’ War, and the Crofters’ Act of 1886; and Tom Johnston, first Labour Secretary of State for ...”

“... any individual could singlehandedly precipitate a major shift in human thought. Adrian Desmond and James Moore place Darwin above Marx and Freud. It is hard to think of successors to that trinity of lone rangers in an age when research is financed by foundations and carried on by teams and generally mounted on the kind of scale where the capacity of execution ...”

“... a similar scene from her own life. On New Year’s Eve 2009, newly engaged, she and her partner, James, were with a group of friends in a yacht anchored off St Barts. The afternoon sun hung ‘low, hot, egg-yolk yellow’ in the sky and they decided to swim to the shore. For Shapton, a former competitive swimmer who had taken part in Canada’s Olympic ...”

“... family annuities expired. He so inhabited his dour poetic persona that his friend and publisher Edward Hookham, writing to the Literary Fund, ‘had but too just reason to dread that the Fate of Chatterton might be that of Peacock’. The committee awarded him £30. Numerous failed courtships intensified the gloom. Peacock was, his cousin remembered, ‘a ...”

“... Edward Snowden​ was born in the summer of 1983. Around this time, the US Defence Department split its computer network into MILNET, an internal military branch, and a public branch, which we now know as the internet. Home computers were becoming pervasive; the Commodore 64 was selling in the millions. One day Snowden’s father brought one home, connected it to the TV set, and the toddler Eddie noticed that his father was now controlling what was happening on the screen ...”

“... for example, that other lost play, The Fronny) reconstructed by the patient detective work of Edward Mendelson, repeatedly exemplify this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s ...”

“... What were you like as a child?’ Dick Cavett asked Edward Gorey on his talk show in November 1977. ‘Small,’ he replied. Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, did not like to talk about himself or his work, which depended, like the Japanese literature he admired, ‘very much [on] what is left out’. Someone who thought of himself principally as a writer, but is now remembered chiefly as an artist and illustrator of his own and other people’s work, Gorey created a peculiar, hermetic world in which the comic and the macabre combine in proportions dependent on the reader’s temperament ...”

“... In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his energetic deputy James Craig, mobilised Ulster Protestants of all classes to resist Home Rule. Carson, who had served as solicitor-general in Lord Salisbury’s Administration, colluded in the ...”