The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Elizabethan courtier and soldier Sir Philip Sidney shows that a nobleman can also be a gentleman.
Writer and courtier Sir Philip Sidney died on October 17th, 1586, from a wound he had suffered while fighting in support of Dutch independence from Spain at the Battle of Zutphen on September 22nd. He was just 31. The account below is by Philip’s devoted friend Fulke Greville, who served James I as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
One week into a Lenten retreat with the Bishop of Hexham, a boy’s miserable life is turned right around.
Bishop John of Hexham (?-721) is better known today as St John of Beverley, as he had been Abbot of the monastery in Beverley, North Yorkshire, before being elevated to the See of Hexham. His contemporary Bede was a great admirer, and told this story of him.
A celebration of St Michael, captain of heaven’s angel host, courteous warrior, and healer.
St Michael is the supreme general of all the angels of God, a figure attested in the Book of Daniel, the Epistle of Jude, and the Revelation of St John the Divine, as well as in Rabbinic literature. In the time of St Bede, as still today in the Eastern Churches, he was associated with healing and a safe passage to heaven.
A faithful but unprepossessing pet is turned out of hearth and home.
This Russian folktale is a story about a tom cat who is abandoned by his fastidious owner, but shows all the philosophical resilience of cats, and reinvents himself as Cat Ivanovitch, Head Forester of all the animals of the wood. But he could not have done it without the help of a little vixen called Lisabeta, and a good deal of luck.
As Japan’s ruling shoguns resist the tide of progress, a Nagasaki-based Scottish entrepreneur steps in.
The story of Japan’s first railway is bound up with the story of the country’s emergence from two centuries of self-imposed isolation. It is a tale in which the British played an important role, from engineer Edmund Morel to Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant and railway enthusiast who took considerable risks to forge Japan’s lasting ties with the British Isles.
Composer Ethel Smyth buys a new-fangled ladies’ bicycle, and scandalises the neighbours.
Ethel Smyth (to rhyme with ‘Forsyth’) was a successful composer of opera and orchestral music, whose lightly-written memoirs – she was acquainted with Brahms, Grieg and several other public figures in music – were also well received. Here, she recalls her scandalous purchase of a ladies’ bicycle in 1894.