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“... these two books have in common, so my comments will be seriatim. The earliest of the essays in the Gordon collection, which is by Gernet, who died in 1962 at the age of 80, first appeared as long ago as 1948; the remainder at various dates since 1968. Of the latter, three are by Vernant, five by Vidal-Naquet, three by Detienne. The fact that the Gernet item ...”

“... chaos. Diana Trilling outlived Lionel by many a book; Mary McCarthy enjoyed the same revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might recoil. (Though it’s fascinating to speculate ...”

“... Craig, had a career as a designer, director and producer of feminist plays; her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, acted with Irving, but became disillusioned with the English theatre and, like other maverick theatre visionaries since, moved to the Continent, where his (rare) productions and extensive theoretical writings are said to have revolutionised theatre ...”

“... Known Figures’, compiled by Carol Brightman, which the reader comes on at the end of the book. Edmund Wilson, one of the Better Known figures, is referred to but has no walk-on part: that marriage is yet to be. Early days with the grandparents in Seattle are mostly a matter of books. Mother and father died of Spanish flu in 1918 on the train on which the ...”

“... include two Welshmen) are not all equally famous. Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and perhaps Edmund Law, need no introduction. But William Worthington and John Gordon have not previously been placed in the august company of the Humes and Priestleys. Worthington figures briefly in the DNB and Williams’s Eminent ...”

“... already fading from the language when the figure who inspired the term, the flamboyant bookseller Edmund Curll, had been dead for less than a decade. Chatterton was still using it a generation later (‘I know the art of Curlism, pretty well,’ his persona Harry Wildfire boasts), and the phenomenon still flourishes in the media today, though without the ...”

“... pruning of the naughty bits) and chose as their appointed biographer a 24-year-old American, Gordon Ray, who had just finished a doctorate on ‘Thackeray and France’. It was an eccentric choice: they could have had their pick of British biographers. But they wanted someone as remote from London’s gossip circuits as possible. Ray – as was standard ...”

“... called Nellie Kershaw was described in the British Medical Journal by a pathologist called William Edmund Cooke, who found that her lungs contained ‘particles of mineral matter’, most of them with ‘sharp angles’. But it would take decades for companies to acknowledge that mesothelioma could be caused by relatively brief exposure to asbestos. In the ...”

“... others. ‘Butcher’ Cumberland, Horace Walpole, Lord North, Charles Fox, the Younger Pitt and Edmund Burke were among those who were robbed or shot at. Yet the victims of crime were rarely prominent people: small shopkeepers and the middling sort were the principal sufferers. The law was not just an engine of the rich for use against the poor. At Essex ...”

“... in prospect, its very favourable treatment of Scotland bought the Union another couple of decades. Gordon Brown’s numbers show ecoomic problems looming for the UK in general – and the Scottish statistics are even worse. A European survey found in September 2001 that the UK had a long-term absent-through-sickness quotient of 7 per cent against 2.1 per cent ...”

“... After​ reading all of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction in 1945, Edmund Wilson concluded that there was nothing scary about stories full of words like ‘eerie’, ‘unhallowed’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘infernal’, ‘hellish’ and ‘unholy’, especially when these refer to an ‘invisible whistling octopus’ (the creature appears at the end of the 1928 story ‘The Call of Cthulhu ...”

“... prizewinner in the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. In one of the catalogue essays the potter Edmund de Waal sets her in the Viennese context. Her career began there at a moment of flux, somewhere towards the end of the Wiener Werkstätte and the beginning of Modernism. It was this crux, de Waal suggests, that made it possible for Rie to define herself by ...”

“... building of a nation under a novel Constitution which inspired the French to flattering imitation? Gordon Wood has argued powerfully, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), that the real revolution lay in the transformation of ‘a monarchical society into a democratic one unlike any that had ever existed’, though even this may underestimate ...”

“... 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 ...”