The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
The fear that Russia might make an ally of Great Britain drove the would-be Emperor of Europe to extreme measures.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s retreat from Moscow in 1812 is one of the epic tales of history, and a generous one. It has given music Tchaikovsky’s unforgettable Overture, it has given rhetoric that stern officer ‘General Winter’, and it has given us all an object lesson in the deserts of excessive political ambition.
Leopold Mozart was eager to win the hearts of the English, and thought he knew just the way to do it.
In 1763-64, Leopold Mozart spent fifteen months in England with his daughter Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’) and son Wolfgang, who turned nine during the visit. Leopold was much taken with King George III and Queen Charlotte, who treated the Mozarts like family, and he told his friend Johann Lorenz von Hagenauer, an Austrian businessman, that he was eager to win the affection of the English people too.
French economist Jean-Baptiste Say recalls a time when an ounce of prevention might have saved many pounds of cure.
Jean-Baptiste Say was a French businessman and economist, an authority on Adam Smith and champion of free markets who in 1804 resigned in protest from Napoleon’s dirigiste government. He told the following story to show that ‘economy is inconsistent with disorder’.
Former slave Ignatius Sancho complained that Britain was denying to Africa the free trade and Christian principles she so badly needed.
In 1778, Ignatius Sancho (1729-1782) wrote a letter to Jack Wingrave, son of his friend John, a London bookseller. Jack’s experiences in Bombay had prejudiced him against the locals, but Sancho reminded him that Britain had promised her colonies free trade and Christian principles, and given them neither.
In 1775, London’s high-handed exploitation of her colonies for tax revenue began to look like a very expensive mistake.
The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) saw thirteen British colonies in North America win independence as the United States of America. For too long, they had sweated in a wretched trade zone created to fill London’s Treasury with gold and line the pockets of her cronies, and it was time for it to stop.