The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
The busy trading hub of Malacca was to be consigned to history, until Stamford Raffles saw that history was one of its assets.
Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is known today as the founder of Singapore, but his first foray into statecraft came when he was still in his late twenties. In 1808, as assistant secretary to the Governor of Penang he penned an impassioned report which saved Malacca, modern-day Melaka in Malaysia, from oblivion.
In 1274, the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople signed a historic reunion, but there were some formidable dissenters.
In 1261, the Roman Emperor Michael Palaeologos won his battered empire back from the Crusaders, but Charles, Count of Anjou, was eager to reconquer the East and bring its ‘schismatic’ Christians under the Pope. Michael instructed the Greek Church to give in and save his crown, but twenty-six monks of Mount Athos were more concerned with their consciences.
An aristocratic widow advertises for a husband, and among the line-up of natty and noble suitors is a rough-and-ready Olaf Tryggvason.
In 984, exiled Norwegian prince Olaf Tryggvason lost his wife Geira, and went on a four-year grief-stricken rampage through Britain, before suddenly becoming a Christian in the Isles of Scilly. Hearing that Gyda, the King of Dublin’s sister, had summoned a Thing (a Viking council) to choose a husband, Olaf returned to England.
In an enduring fable from the Kathasaritsagara, an Indian merchant explains how he acquired his nickname.
Gunadhya, sixth-century narrator of this tale from the Kathasaritsagara, was in Pratisthana (Paithan) watching little knots of men in the city conducting their business. They included bookies promising treasure to gamblers, but among the merchants was a man who had a better way to become rich.
The lovely Shakuntala is wooed by a great King, but almost at once he forgets her.
‘The Recognition of Shakuntala’ is a play by fifth-century Indian dramatist Kalidasa, derived from the ancient Mahabharata, and made popular in Georgian England by Calcutta judge William Jones. It tells of a shy young woman who is wooed and wedded by a great King, who afterwards cannot remember her at all.
Over a hundred young Greeks were slated to be shot after resistance fighters and British forces sabotaged an airfield.
The German occupation of Greece began in 1941, and continued for three years of forced labour, summary executions, and famines. By the summer of 1944, Berlin was struggling to keep hold of the Mediterranean, but airbases popping up on the Greek islands might have been a grave setback for the Allied cause.