The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
William Gladstone complained that some politicians talk about freedom but don’t trust the people enough to let them have any.
As a young Tory, William Gladstone had opposed extending the vote to more people; by 1878, and now a Liberal Party MP and former Prime Minister, he was all in favour of it. Justifying his U-turn at Oxford University’s newly-founded Palmerston Club, he explained that it is not enough to talk of liberty: you have to trust the people with it.
William Gladstone urges Government not to take away from people the things they have a right to do for themselves.
In 1889, at the opening of Reading and Recreation Rooms at the Saltney Literary Institute in Cheshire, Prime Minister William Gladstone spoke warmly of the benefits of lifelong, self-directed education for the working man, and warned against letting Government take it over.
A headstrong Irish boy became part of the Greek resistance movement that won independence in 1832.
At sixteen, Richard Church (1784-1873) ran away from home in Cork and enlisted in the British Army. He made a name for himself liberating the Ionian Islands from Napoleon in 1809, and formed two new Greek regiments there in British pay. So when a favourite recruit wrote to him in 1826, pleading for help, he could hardly refuse.
Lucy Cazalet gives an overview of the remarkable Russian ruler, who showed the courage of a prince and the humility of a saint.
Alexander Nevsky (1221-1263), Prince of Novgorod, is a saint of the Russian Church, and one of the country’s greatest heroes. As Lucy Cazalet explains here, Alexander showed humility to keep peace with the Tartars, who were content with Russia’s money, but grew tigerish when more actively threatened by the West, who wanted Russia’s soul.
The Scottish department store near the Bolshoi Theatre inspired an affection that contrasted sharply with Westminster’s Russophobia.
Politics in Victorian Britain suffered badly from hysterical Russophobia, but between the peoples and merchants of the two nations there was a growing warmth. Nowhere was it more obvious than in the affection felt across the Russian Empire towards ‘Muirka’, the Scottish firm of Muir and Mirrielees.
Young Thomas Cochrane learned early on that for a sailor, making a pet of a parrot could be surprisingly hazardous.
In 1793, the new French Republic declared war on Britain, and the Admiralty sent HMS ‘Hind’ to Norway to flush out any French privateers preying on our Baltic trade. Captain Alexander Cochrane’s crew included first lieutenant Jack Larmour, and also our author, the captain’s nephew Thomas, then a seventeen-year-old midshipman.