Press: Happy Birthday, London

Times The 200-year-old paper seems ready to erase years of red ink

Abraham Lincoln compared its power to the surging Mississippi River. Jane Austen found it so indispensable that she ironed it out when it was damp. Thackeray endured its "rather shabby pay," Coleridge tried in vain to join its staff, and Dickens endured its critical contempt. It accompanied the Light Brigade to the Valley of Death in the Crimea, and climbed with Edmund Hillary up Mount Everest. Although it proudly displays the royal coat of arms on its masthead, in an 1830 obituary it described the standard of conduct of King George IV as "little higher than that of animal indulgence," and...

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