Word: edinburgh
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...education's better ironies is that the broad, stately river of classified knowledge named Encyclopaedia Britannica began 190 years ago in a clear, sparkling rill of Scotch whisky. The tale of the encyclopedia's turbulent course from the Edinburgh workshop of hard-drinking Editor William Smellie to its present serene residence at the University of Chicago is told in The Great EB (University of Chicago Press; 339 pp.; $4.95) by Herman Kogan, drama critic and books editor of the Chicago Sun-Times...
...Europe's Enlightenment was in full vigor; Denis Diderot's French Encyclopedic had just come out, and Britain was ripe for an up-to-date compendium of all knowledge. The Britannica's founders were Colin Macfarquhar, a small-business man of Edinburgh, and Andrew Bell, an engraver of dog collars, who stood 4½ ft. tall, and had a nose so embarrassingly big that he used to mock his mockers with an even larger one of papier-mache. Smellie, their 28-year-old choice for editor, spieled long Latin poems when drunk, and was celebrated...
...Firstborn (by Christopher Fry), begun in 1938, was first staged in 1948 at the Edinburgh Festival. A stiffly earnest play, it is laid in Egypt and centered in Moses. With the Pharaoh persecuting the Jews, a Moses already estranged from the palace of his upbringing turns wholly to the people of his birth. In the conflict, Pharaoh's young son Rameses sympathizes with the oppressed: but when the firstborn in every Egyptian family is struck down, the humane royal firstborn perishes with the rest...
This macabre little song chilled many bones in Edinburgh when the "resurrectionists," i.e., men who stole fresh bodies for surgical research, flourished a century or so ago. A true resurrectionist, who dealt in live bodies while practicing a trade in mercy on the bloody landscape of the Europe of the 19403, is a man named Joel Brand. He told his story to a German journalist, Alex Weissberg, who put it down baldly and brutally. Fine writing would be an offense against the appalling facts of this bitter memoir...
Congratulations to TIME for its article on the Duke of Edinburgh. He is the obvious choice...