The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Anglo-Saxon abbot Elfric tentatively likened the new-born Jesus to an egg.
In a Sermon for Christmas Day, Anglo-Saxon abbot Elfric of Eynsham likened the new-born baby in the manger to an egg. His purpose was serious: he wanted his congregation to understand that Jesus Christ was the incarnate Son, Word and Wisdom of God, not merely a prophet or good man that God loved like a son.
Canadian sailor William Hall was summoned over to India to help face down the Indian Mutiny.
William Nelson Hall (1827-1904) had every reason to love the Royal Navy. Under instructions from the Admiralty in London, the Navy had helped his parents and thousands of others to escape slavery in Maryland. The Halls were resettled as free citizens in Nova Scotia, where William was born, and he repaid the Navy handsomely during the Indian Mutiny thirty years later.
During the Indian Mutiny, over a thousand men, women and children were trapped in the Commissioner’s residence at Lucknow.
The Indian Mutiny in 1857 saw many of the East India Company’s sepoys (Indian soldiers) join with angry princes to protest at the Company’s disrespectful and corrupt administration. The revolt turned nasty, and in June that year things looked bleak for the Company’s staff at Lucknow, in the former Kingdom of Oudh.
King Louis XIV of France raised rebellion in Ireland to put his own man on the English throne.
Throughout the 1680s, King Louis XIV of France nibbled away at countries along the French border from Holland to the Alps, while his ally Turkey harassed them from the other side. Only William, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, offered any real resistance, but his navy was too small do anything about it until 1688, when an extraordinary stroke of luck came his way.
Richard Hannay sees for himself how political activists trick decent people into supporting their quest for power.
Early in the Great War, Richard Hannay is in Constantinople, in pursuit of a German secret agent named Hilda von Einem. Hilda has duped a dreamy Muslim mystic into believing Germany shares his vision for society, and as Sandy Arbuthnot explains, that could be very bad both for the Arab world and for England.
The Parliament of Scotland tried to liberate itself from London’s strangling single market.
‘Protectionism’ means stifling competition and imports to safeguard domestic industry and so tax revenue. Most European governments were guilty of it in the seventeenth century (they still are) and the Scots were feeling the pinch of it.