The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Standing on the dockside with Laertes, who is eager to board ship for Paris, Polonius takes a moment to share some fatherly wisdom.
Early in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, probably written around 1599-1601, Laertes is due to leave Denmark for France; he had returned home only briefly for the coronation of King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and step-father. As Laertes goes aboard, his father Polonius gives him his affectionate blessing, and with it a generous helping of common sense.
After word came that Harry Demane had been lured aboard a slave-ship, Granville Sharp had only a few hours in which to make sure he did not sail.
Thanks to campaigner Granville Sharp, ‘Somersett’s Case’ in 1772 proved that slave owners could expect no help from our courts. But they could still sell their African servants into slavery in far-off British colonies, and when Mr Jeffries of Bedford Street did just that, the race was on to find Harry Demane before his ship left port — even as London was settling down for the weekend.
The great French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte protested that in calling England ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ he had paid us a compliment.
‘The English are a nation of shopkeepers’ intoned Napoleon Bonaparte, offending many English politicians including Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1822. But as the great General, by now exiled on the island of St Helena, told his personal physician Dr O’Meara, he had meant it as a compliment. The English, he said, should stop trying to be French.
After a visit to England in 1847, Aleksey Khomyakov published his impressions of our country and our people in a Moscow magazine.
Russian landowner Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860) paid a visit to England in 1847. He subsequently sent a letter to a Moscow journal in which he relayed his impressions of England and the English, at a time when relations between the two countries were strained over Afghanistan and Turkey. In 1895, John Birkbeck summarised Khomyakov’s commentary for those who knew no Russian.
Alexander, who had just taken the bath intended for his vanquished enemy Darius of Persia and was now eating Darius’s supper, was interrupted by a commotion in the camp.
It is November 5th, 333 BC. Aided by his fast friend Hephaestion, the young King Alexander of Macedon in northern Greece has just defeated Darius III, King of Persia, at the Battle of Issus on the modern-day Turkish-Syrian border. The first thing he did after taking possession of the enemy camp was to go to the hot bath prepared for Darius. ‘So this’ he laughed as slaves poured in fragrant salts ‘is what it is to be a king!’
As he sat in his guest room at Durham Abbey, Ranulf de Capella could think of nothing but finding someone to rid him of his painful toothache.
Reginald of Durham was a monk at the Benedictine Abbey in Durham from about 1153 until his death some forty years later. The Abbey church housed the coffin and body (untouched by time, despite being regularly opened to view) of seventh-century miracle-working bishop St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and from the steady stream of pilgrims who came to visit the shrine Reginald collected a fund of amazing tales.