The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
If freedom and democracy are to have any meaning, the public must be able to talk back to their governors.
The euphoria that followed the Allied victory over Nazi Germany four years earlier had not clouded schoolmaster NL Clay’s wits. In Straightforward English (1949), a guide ‘designed to help an ordinary person to write a clear message’, he told the British public that we must speak plainly and never be satisfied with slogans or jargon, or we would find ourselves walking down the same unhappy road as the Germans.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden pleaded for Britain to set the world an example as a nation open for business.
Richard Cobden MP urged Queen Victoria’s Parliament to embrace a policy of global free trade, instead of the over-regulated, over-taxed trade deals brokered by politicians and their friends behind closed doors. It was, he said, nothing less than the next step in Britain’s destiny, and her Christian duty.
An eccentric, self-made businesswoman, who ‘made three fortunes and spent five’ in the campaign against the death penalty.
Violet van der Elst (1882-1966) was a highly eccentric self-made businesswoman from a working-class background, who arguably did more than anyone else to end the barbaric practice of capital punishment. Yet she died forgotten and all but penniless, having given all she had for her cause.
A young Jewish girl is chosen as the Queen of Persia, but quickly finds she has enemies.
The story of Esther is the story behind the Jewish feast of Purim on the 14th of Adar, which falls in February-March. The tale is set in the 480s BC, following Persia’s conquest of Babylon, when the Kings of Persia became lords over Jewish people scattered right across the ancient Near East.
Jane Eyre meets a not very handsome stranger, and likes him all the better for it.
On a dark road near Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre has caused a stranger’s horse to shy and throw its rider, a big, frowning and far from good-looking man. He brushes her offers of help away, but she hangs around all the same, prompting her to wonder why she feels so comfortable with this gruff traveller.