The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
William Murdoch’s experiments with steam traction impressed his next-door neighbour, with world-changing results.
The clever hand-powered wooden tricycle that a young William Murdoch built with his father made a triumphant reappearance many years later as a miniature steam-powered vehicle. That in turn led to the railway revolution – courtesy of his next-door-neighbour.
Cuthbert trusted that keeping his promised fast would not do him any harm.
A shieling is a temporary stone hut, built for the summer months when sheep or cattle are taken to higher ground. Bede tells us that a near-contemporary, the seventh-century saint Cuthbert, once had a remarkable experience in one of these huts, as he was journeying across the empty moorland of Northumbria.
Mr Snawley has two stepsons he would like to offload, and Mr Squeers seems just the right person to help him.
Mr Wackford Squeers, headmaster of Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire, is in London looking for clients. He is approached at the Saracen’s Head by a Mr Snawley, step-father to two small boys, who is looking for a cheap, far-off boarding school with none of those ill-judged holidays ‘that unsettle children’s minds so’.
If Britain is a chessboard, then politicians should remember that the ‘pieces’ are alive, and they generally play a better game.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith has been discussing how the character of individuals may affect the happiness of wider society. He sets up a contrast between ‘the man of humanity and benevolence’, who respects others and tries to improve society by persuasion, and ‘the man of system’, who reaches out to move people and peoples around as if they were just pawns on a chessboard.
Kate Nickleby must bite her lip as she experiences snobbery for the first time.
After falling on hard times, Kate Nickleby, daughter of a country gentleman, has gratefully accepted a job in a dressmaker’s. But a mother and daughter have come in, and being in an ill temper have chosen to take it out on the new assistant.
From performance and composition to instrument-making, Clementi left his mark on British and European classical music.
Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) came from Rome to England as a boy, to become one of the most prolific of British composers, and an internationally respected teacher and performer. An able businessman, he also turned a bankrupt firm of London instrument-makers into a Europe-wide success.