The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
An Elizabethan mariner reaches Japan under terrible hardships, only to find himself under sentence of death at the hands of his fellow Europeans.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch were Elizabeth I’s Protestant allies against Europe’s Catholic states and the cruel Inquisition. This made trade with South America and the Far East, where Spanish and Portuguese merchants were already established, a matter of bitter and bloody rivalry.
A street urchin of Lahore takes it on himself to provide a naive Tibetan monk with a hot meal.
Young Kim O’Hara, who knows all the ways and wiles of the dusty streets of Lahore, has promised to help a Tibetan monk beg for his dinner. He has high hopes of a certain grocer’s wife, but she is not disposed to dole out charity to yet another holy man.
Four knights thought they were helping their King, but they could not have made a greater mistake.
Henry II (r. 1154-1189) appointed his friend Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury, thinking he would always do as he was told. But Becket proved very independent-minded, and even had to flee to France to escape his King’s anger.
The Dutch explorer ran across two islands in the Pacific of which Europeans knew nothing, but his chief desire was to get past them.
New Zealand came under British control with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; James Cook had charted its coasts in the 1770s, but Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had set the first European eyes on the islands, over a century before. As William Reeves notes, however, he was interested only in getting past them.
A dozy rabbit gets an idea into his head and soon all the animals of India are running for their lives.
The following tale from the fourth-century BC Jataka Tales was told to illustrate how Hindu ascetics blindly copied one another’s eye-catching but useless mortifications; but it might just as well be applied to stock-market rumours or ‘project fear’ politics.
The birth of Jesus Christ fundamentally changed the relationship between mankind and the angels.
Elfric of Eynsham reminds us that when God’s Son took flesh and was born from the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem, he conferred an honour on all human bodies and indeed all creation. After the Nativity, even the angels changed their dealings with us, out of respect for what happened on that night in the inn.