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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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Thomas Bowdler
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(1754–1825) His lasting place in the language, in the form of the verb to 'bowdlerize', derives from his 10-volume edition of Shakespeare (1818) in which he removed anything which could not 'with propriety be read aloud in a family'. This ranged from single words ('God' invariably became 'Heaven') to entire passages and characters, thus playing havoc with both sound and sense. But his edition was extremely popular. He then set about the equally daunting task of purging Gibbon's *Decline and Fall of 'all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency'.
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