The judge told them, as he sent them away for 30 years, that it was "a crime which in its impudence and enormity is the first of its kind in this country.
Robbing the Royal Mail was, as the trial judge, Mr Justice Edmund Davies, told Biggs, "a crime which, in its impudence and enormity, is the first of its kind in this country".
In fact, one of the reasons the robbery became so well known was the length of sentences doled out by Mr Justice Edmund Davies, who said it was "a crime which in its impudence and enormity is the first of its kind in this country.
This article was amended on 9 September 2014 to change the term "enormity" to "scale and importance" in the first paragraph.
As they sped through the Dallas streets, Lady Bird, following in the second car, saw, atop a building, a flag at half mast: "I think that is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me".
In The Third Reich: A New History (Macmillan), Michael Burleigh proceeds from the premise that Nazism was a quasi-religion whose programme allowed the faithful to perpetrate enormities with a clear conscience.
The cognate enormity in my youth was 'The New Math'.
Sparano said the enormity of his first head coaching job, of finally becoming what he always wanted, had not sunk in.
Most are young and healthy, and for the first time in their lives are confronting the enormity and randomness of human illness, leaving them fearful and vulnerable.
For the first time, the enormity of the situation hit me.
