The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Benjamin Disraeli revealed the secret behind holding one’s place at the top of Parisian society.
In February 1860 the new Cobden-Chevalier treaty was announced, a breakthrough free-trade deal with France, and a new era in Anglo-French relations. An especially vocal opponent of it was MP and novelist Benjamin Disraeli; so when John Bright rose in the Commons and read aloud this passage from Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844), he drew a good deal of laughter.
Whenever Charles Dickens felt his exhausting workload was starting to take its toll, he knew just what to do.
Charles Dickens corresponded regularly with a Swiss friend whom he had met in Lausanne, a M. de Cerjat. In one of his letters, written from his home near Rochester in Kent, Dickens shared with his friend the secret of his remarkably industrious working life — frequent trips to France.
The animals in the jungle agree that amidst the drought, the sport of hunter and hunted has to be suspended.
In Rudyard Kipling’s story The Jungle Book, a prolonged drought has left Mowgli and the animals with no food and little water. The waterhole has sunk so low that the Peace Rock is showing, and Hathi, the elephant, has called the Water Truce so hunter and hunted alike can drink. As dusk falls, the truce is holding — though Bagheera, the black panther, isn’t much help.
A loving parent doesn’t want her son to be a success; she wants him to be a fine human being.
In February 1878, Fyodor Dostoevsky received a letter from an anxious mother asking him how to bring up a child. Dostoevsky was taken aback, and told her plainly that she was requiring more wisdom than he was fit to give. In particular, her question “What is good, and what is not good?” left him almost speechless; fortunately for us, that left just enough speech to impart this touching counsel.
One author was a long way ahead at the top of Dostoevsky’s reading list.
In one letter, Nikolai Osmidov asked novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky whether he should believe in God; in another, he asked him what he should give his daughter to read. Dostoevsky found none of Osmidov’s questions easy to answer, but he was sure about one thing: the girl absolutely must read the novels of Sir Walter Scott.
Nobody has a monopoly on the truth, neither the scholars of the past nor the scholars of today.
In Ben Jonson’s day, many theatre critics demanded strict adherence to the principles laid down by classical theorists. Modernisers scoffed, and allowed the ancients no place at all. The Truth, said Jonson, cannot be jealously fenced off like this, either for the critics of the past or for the critics of today. It belongs to everyone, like the village green. The critic’s job is to keep it all looking attractive.