The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
John Buchan warned that the great figures of history are often beyond their biographers’ comprehension.
John Buchan had little time for the kind of historian who makes a career out of rubbishing reputations, pulling the great (if flawed) figures of history down from their pedestals in the hope of some scattered applause from his peers. Some giants of history are quite simply too big for their critics.
Sir William Napier stopped to console an unhappy little girl, and made her a promise he did not find it easy to keep.
Sir William Napier (1785-1860) was a soldier and military historian, whose monumental ‘History of the Peninsular War’ helped establish the enduring reputation of Wellington, and commands respect to this day. He was also a man of honour whose word was his bond, as the following story, told by his daughter, shows.
Ardent opera buffs descend like locusts on Jenny Lind’s hotel, eager for a memento.
In a letter to Douglas Jerrold, dated Paris, February 14th, 1847, Charles Dickens related an anecdote about the opera singer Jenny Lind (1820-1887), popularly known as the Swedish Nightingale. Her celebrity throughout Europe bordered on the hysterical, as Dickens shows.
When Lord Salisbury asked the Russian Minister of the Interior how many agents the Tsar had in India, the reply came as a shock.
Throughout the nineteenth century, London was afraid that the Russian Empire would invade India through Afghanistan. Russian reassurances fell on deaf ears, leading to war in Afghanistan in 1838-42 and again in 1878-80. Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India, issued a press crackdown, and Russophobia in the home press spiked.
William Stead warned his fellow-journalists to take care that their bellicose rhetoric did not end in a real war with Russia.
After witnessing a Russian village burn to the ground because a boy played with matches in a barn, journalist William Stead (1849-1912) was moved to be severe on those other ‘boys with matches’ — the hawkish British press, whose incendiary words could spark the powder kegs of European politics.
Gaius Caesar is disappointed with the quality of the entertainment on offer in Rome’s Circus Maximus.
The well-known story of Androcles and the lion goes back to an eyewitness account written down by Apion (?30 BC - AD ?48), a learned Egyptian whose works are, sadly, entirely lost. Fortunately, passages survive in the work of Aulus Gellius (AD ?125–?180+), and what follows here is based on his ‘Attic Nights’.