The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
A twelve-year-old girl from Lyme Regis made a historic discovery while selling seashells to tourists.
Around the time that the fictional Anne Elliot paid a visit to Lyme Regis in Jane Austen’s novel ‘Persuasion’, in real life a young girl named Mary Anning was chipping away at the nearby cliffs, and had already entered the history books.
High above the roof of the Amazonian rainforest, Professor Challenger sees something that eerily reminds him of home.
High on a remote plateau amidst the Brazilian rainforest, Edward Malone, Professor Challenger and their party of explorers come across fresh, oozing prints in the mud. Lord John Roxton sees three toes and thinks ‘bird’, but the sight reminds Professor Challenger of Sussex — and quite a different creature.
In the fourth century, Britain’s Christians acquired a taste for watering down the mystery of their message.
When the Roman Emperor Constantine ended decades of persecution for Christians in February 313, those in Britain returned to their churches with simple joy. Yet missionaries to Anglo-Saxon Britain in 597 found a church scattered and plagued by alien beliefs. St Bede blamed a priest from Egypt, Arius, for the startling change.
As proof that ‘Providence protects children and idiots’, Mark Twain recalls his first taste of ten-pin bowling.
Mark Twain was invited by fellow office-workers to go bowling with them. He declined as he knew nothing of the game, but now they seemed so anxious for his company that he was rather flattered, and gave in.
Sam felt that his epic romance might have started more promisingly.
Wodehouse puts forth all his powers here to tell us everything we need to know about rich, athletic and amiably dim Sam Marlowe. The susceptible Sam has just arrived in New York from England, and now finds himself next to a very pretty girl. Something, however, seems to be clouding this sunshine moment.
Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf imagines the farewell between Jesus and his Apostles, forty days after his resurrection.
Cynewulf (possibly the 8th century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) imagines Christ’s last words to his Apostles, before a cloud came and took him from their sight, never to be seen again – and yet, somehow, never to leave them.