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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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E.C. Bentley
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(Edmund Clerihew Bentley, 1875–1956) Journalist whose lasting fame is as an author of detective fiction (in particular Trent's Last Case 1913) and as the inventor of the clerihew. The first examples of this type of 4-line humorous verse, with the subject's name providing the rhyme for the opening couplet, appeared in his Biography for Beginners (1905, with illustrations by his close friend G.K. Chesterton). A typical biography runs: Sir Christopher Wren Said, 'I am going to dine with some men. If anybody calls Say I am designing St Paul's.' Such a verse became known as a clerihew because the volume was published under the pseudonym E. Clerihew, based on the author's first two names.
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