The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Richard Hannay reflects on the innocent lives lost, when the lust for power or the desire for revenge makes us less than human.
It is Christmas 1915, and on a secret mission during the Great War, Richard Hannay has found refuge in a remote cottage in southern Germany. The house is kept by a desperately poor woman with three children, whose husband is away fighting the Russians. Hannay comes to realise that, unlike the German government, he does care about collateral damage.
Our hero is sent to deal with some man-eating birds, but cannot reach their lakeside refuge.
Still working off his debt to the gods after killing his children in a blind rage, Heracles is now despatched by his envious cousin King Eurystheus to rid a village of some man-eating birds. However, not everyone is against him.
The saintly Bishop helped the captain of a merchant ship to cut through the red tape, and save his town from starvation.
St Nicholas (d. 343) was Bishop of Myra, a town in the Roman Province of Lycia, on the southwest coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). According to his 9th-century biographer, Michael, one miracle in particular gained him a reputation in the Imperial capital itself.
The Northumbrian saint warned of an enemy who would stop at nothing to silence the good news.
While he was a monk at Melrose in the Scottish Borders, then part of the Kingdom of Northumbria, St Cuthbert used to visit lonely villages to tell people about a God very different from the capricious pagan spirits they feared and worshipped. He became a popular figure, able to draw surprising crowds.
Jim Hawkins, on a remote desert island, has escaped pirates only to be caught by a shadowy figure among the trees.
Young Jim Hawkins has sailed thousands of miles to a desert island to dig up a king’s ransom in hidden treasure, only to find on arrival that his ship’s crew were all pirates. He has just escaped from them — but now a strange figure emerges from the trees to confront him.
Samuel Smiles reminds us that until we brought the railways to India, we had little to boast about as an imperial power.
Samuel Smiles’s biography of George and Robert Stephenson opens with a heartfelt appreciation of the social and economic progress brought by the railways. He describes how this peculiarly British invention had by the 1870s already reached most European countries and beyond, and of course he could not fail to mention the railways of India.