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 Rivers Son and Narmada rise together in the hills of Amarkantak, but because of Johilla they never meet again.
William Sleeman, after whom the little village of Sleemanabad in Madhya Pradesh is named, retold a classic Indian fable in an open letter to his sister. It is a love story of three rivers, the Narmada (Nerbudda), the Son and the Johila, and explains why the Narmada and the Son rise in the same place in central India, but flow in opposite directions.
Alice was given a choice between her carriage and lady’s maid on the one hand, and Richard Grey on the other.
Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey tells the tale of a young woman forced to earn a meagre and humiliating living as a governess. The shock of employment and the utterly alien lives of her employers is hard to bear, but no daughter of Richard and Alice Grey was afraid of a little self-sacrifice.
Herbert Bury distinguished two kinds of overseas investment, and only one was worthy of Englishmen.
Herbert Bury, whose duties as an assistant bishop to the Bishop of London took him all over Europe, came to believe that Britain’s place in the world depended not on bending other countries to our will or draining their resources, but on helping them to grow.
Herbert Bury believed that it was the British way to profit with another country, not to profit from it.
In 1912, the Lena massacre in Russia saw 250 gold miners shot during protests over low wages and harsh conditions in a mine backed by British money. Investors were ashamed when they learnt of the systematic exploitation, and Herbert Bury assured Tsar Nicholas II that decent Englishmen wanted Russia’s people to prosper.
When Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, became the Tower of London’s first prisoner he did not intend making a long stay.
Ranulf Flambard followed William the Conqueror over to England, helped compile the Domesday Book, and collected eye-watering taxes for William II ‘Rufus’. On his accession in 1100, Henry I won many friends by making the abrasive and ambitious cleric, now Bishop of Durham, the Tower of London’s first prisoner.
Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna was a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, but to one ordinary Russian she was simply ‘dear Elizabeth’.
Herbert Bury was Anglican bishop for Northern Europe from 1911 to 1926. His duties took him to Russia, where he met Tsar Nicholas II and was deeply impressed by the Royal Family. The following story about the Tsar’s sister-in-law Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who was later martyred by the Communists, shows why.