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Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.

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1621
Typical Cat! by P. G. Wodehouse

When a cat comes into your life, resistance is futile.

Aspiring author Elizabeth had been needing a little bit of good luck, and finding a stray black cat she named ‘Joseph’ seemed like a good omen.

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1622
Cain and Abel by Clay Lane

Smarting for his outraged ‘rights’, Cain lost his reason — but not God’s pity and love.

Abel and his brother Cain were the sons of Adam and Eve. Theirs is a universal tale of what long-nursed envy and a sense of outraged ‘rights’ can lead us to do; but it is also an allegory of the deteriorating relationship between Judah and the ten tribes of northern Israel in the 8th century BC.

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1623
Daniel in the Lions’ Den by Clay Lane

The King who condemned him to the den of lions felt far worse about it than Daniel did.

Nebuchadnezzar II was King of Babylon (near to modern Baghdad) in the 6th century BC. Many Jews lived there, after Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians 587 BC.

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1624
Belshazzar’s Feast by Clay Lane

Prince Belshazzar’s disrespectful behaviour left him facing the original ‘writing on the wall’.

Belshazzar was a prince in Babylon (near what is now Baghdad, Iraq) in the 6th century BC. While his father King Nabonidus was away, Belshazzar had the government of the Empire in his father’s stead.

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1625
Mrs Bold’s Thunderclap by Anthony Trollope

There comes a point in some relationships when words just aren’t enough.

In the gardens of the Rectory at Ullathorne, the ambitious Mr Slope, chaplain to the Bishop of Barchester, declares his ‘love’ for wealthy widow Mrs Bold.

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1626
There is No Liberty without Self-Control by Edmund Burke

Anti-Christian governments don’t make us free, they just impose their own, illiberal morality.

Edmund Burke MP explained to the new secularist French Revolutionaries that if you reject Christian self-control, the government will impose its own morality, and then you won’t be free anymore.

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© Nicholas Armitage / Clay Lane, 2025

June 10 NS

May 28 OS

Black Agnes Dunbar : When Edward III sent the Earl of Salisbury to take her absent husband’s castle, Agnes brushed his attack aside - literally.
The Battle of Glen Shiel : King Philip V of Spain sent a second Spanish Armada against Britain, but it suffered much the same fate as the first.
‘My English Joy’ : In 1837 William Sterndale Bennett, then regarded as England’s most exciting young composer, made history in quite another... field.
The Two Shakespeares : Arthur Clutton-Brock complained that idealising Shakespeare had made him dull.
Fairway : Use each noun below in two sentences, first as the subject, and then as the object of a verb.
England Expects : Lieutenant John Pasco not only flew the most famous signal in British history, he helped write it.
Running Late : Use these adverbial clauses in your own sentences.
Peggy’s Dog : Some lines from the comic verse of Thomas Hood, for reading aloud.
An Interruption : Report this conversation without using direct speech.
Tender Plants : Prince Albert regretted the destructive power of the Art Critic.
Lost for Words : Join these ideas together into a single sentence, using ‘although’ or ‘though’.
Loan Words : Match these words to the language they come from, whether Old Norse, Malay or Welsh.
Evidence : Join these ideas together to form a single sentence, using the relative pronoun ‘who’.
Fatal Vow : Robert Pierrepont called heaven to witness that he would never pick a side in the Civil War.
Lost and Found : What would you in these difficult situations?
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