Read short passages similar to those NL Clay collected in his anthologies, to gain a feeling for the language, history and culture of the English-speaking world.
In The Copybook
Read short passages similar to those NL Clay collected in his anthologies, to gain a feeling for the language, history and culture of the English-speaking world.
In The Copybook
Grand Duke Dmitri of Moscow loosened the grip of the Tartar Horde on the people of Russia, but treachery robbed him of triumph.
The tale of St Dmitri of the Don is a tale of the quest to free a people from foreign domination, of hard-fought victory and of wholly avoidable defeat. In 1380, Grand Duke Dmitri I of Moscow, aged just twenty-nine, freed the city from generations of vassalage to the Tartar Golden Horde, only for treachery to bring all that he had achieved to nothing in the very hour of triumph.
As soon the Roman Emperor Constantine declared religious liberty in his Empire, the Christian Church gave him cause for regret.
In 312, Constantine confirmed his election as Roman Emperor in battle, fighting under the banner of the Cross. Among his first acts as Emperor was to declare religious liberty across the Roman world, but almost immediately a learned priest from Alexandria in Egypt named Arius threw everything into chaos.
Howard gave his life to saving the ‘great gifts and strange inconsistencies’ of Britain’s unique democracy.
Leslie Howard Steiner (1893-1943) was born in London, to an English mother and a Jewish father who had emigrated from Hungary. Howard became the quintessential British matinee-idol, languid, slightly detached, but with a sense of something more beneath: a curious case of art imitating life.
Admiral Lord Howe battered a French fleet far out in the Atlantic, and helped prevent the spread of bloody revolution.
As soon as power had been secured after the Revolution of 1789, France’s new government began invading neighbouring countries in Europe, and seeking to evangelize the world with revolutionary fervour. Happily, the seed of republicanism fell on very stony ground on this side of the Channel.
The weight of the crown that Anne Boleyn wore proved too heavy to bear.
On Saturday afternoon, May 31st, 1533, Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, was taken from the Tower of London to Westminster Hall, to be crowned in the Abbey next morning. The wider public was disgusted by the way Henry had jilted Catherine, by a two-year affair, a secret marriage, and a controversial divorce (in that order); yet crowded streets were hung with bunting, and the cavalcade was magnificent.
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Joseph’s master finds his new servant indispensable, but unfortunately his wife finds him irresistible.
Young Joseph’s brothers have wearied of his dreams of glory and his position as their father Jacob’s favourite. So they have beaten him, stripped him of his fine coat, and sold him to a passing caravan of merchants bound for Egypt. The story for Jacob, however, is that a wild animal has killed his beloved son.
Prince Albert regretted the destructive power of the Art Critic.
On May 3rd, 1851, Prince Albert spoke at a dinner in honour of the recently elected President of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793-1865). The present company, the Prince admitted, were better placed to judge Sir Charles as an artist. But thanks to working closely so with him, he had learnt something about their new President that they might not know: how kindly he dealt with other artists.
Robert Pierrepont called heaven to witness that he would never pick a side in the Civil War.
Robert Pierrepont (1584-1623), 1st Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull, sided with Charles I in the Civil War after much debate. Soon afterwards, on July 16th, 1643, he was captured by the Parliamentarians at Gainsborough, and died in a botched rescue attempt. When the war was over, and Charles II had been restored to his throne, Lucy Hutchinson added a strange detail to the Earl’s sad story.
Ben Jonson tells us how we should measure a life well lived.
Ben Jonson’s collection of short poems Underwoods was published in 1640, soon after he died. He tells us that it takes its title from a habit of classical poets, who liked to call their miscellanies ‘Woods’. If Jonson’s earlier poems were his woods, he said, then these little additions were shrubs on the woodland floor. The following lines are a reflection on the value of a life.
Thomas Jefferson recalls the virtues (and a few faults) of the first US President.
In 1814, former US President Thomas Jefferson (who had served from 1801 to 1809) wrote a letter to Walter Jones (1776-1861), a lawyer whom Jefferson had appointed US attorney for the District of Columbia in 1802. In his letter, Jefferson reminisced about George Washington, supreme commander of the American revolutionary army and first President of the USA.
John Bright declared it was time stop fighting wars around the world for ‘British interests’.
On January 13th, 1878, John Bright MP assured his constituents in Birmingham that reports of an imminent Russian invasion of Europe were utter delusion. Some in the Commons said that sending troops to aid Turkey in the Russo-Turkish War (now a year old) was in the ‘British interest’, but Bright reminded them how the Crimean War in 1853-56 had achieved nothing but a million dead young men.
In the midst of the US Civil War, a simple melody briefly brought the warring factions together.
J. William Jones was a Baptist minister and former chaplain to the Confederate Army in the US Civil War. While in Chattanooga, Tennessee, attending the Southern Baptist Convention held there on 8th-14th May, 1896, Jones was asked to give a speech at a state school, during a ceremony honouring the Union flag. These were his closing remarks, as given in Confederate Veteran magazine that August.