The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Walking with his ten-year-old daughter on the beach at Calais, Wordsworth considers the energy of God moving in all things.
In 1792, a young William Wordsworth visited France and met Annette Vallon. The lovers had a daughter, Caroline, but were sundered when Revolutionary France declared war on Britain. Shortly before William married Mary Hutchinson in October 1802, with her encouragement William seized the opportunity of the Peace of Amiens to visit Calais for a seaside walk with his little daughter.
Sherlock Holmes turns to his brother for help when the case of a missing Greek proves unexpectedly troublesome.
A translator in London has witnessed what he believes is the kidnapping of a Greek man. Sherlock Holmes is frustrated by the lack of data, so he takes Dr Watson to see his brother Mycroft at the exclusive Diogenes Club. Mycroft, Sherlock claims, is an even better detective than he is.
A mild-mannered clerk in the British Embassy’s passport office in Berlin, just before the outbreak of war in 1939, was not all he seemed to be.
By 1938, Germany had stopped forcing Jews to leave the country and was interning them in camps, yet thousands still escaped into British-run Palestine. An angry Arab backlash prompted the Foreign Office in London to dam the flood, but one man had both the will and the means to introduce more than a few leaks.
Olaf hears that the ruler of Norway has lost the support of his noblemen, and sails away from England to claim his crown.
Hakon Sigurdarson, Norway’s de facto ruler, has gone to ground after upsetting his noblemen. His rival, Olaf Tryggvason, recently returned from England, guesses that Hakon will seek out Thora of Rimol; but Thora has hidden Earl Hakon and his servant Karker beneath the floor of a pigsty.
A mouse’s delight at seeing his old enemy caught in a trap proves short-lived.
Yaugandharayana, minister of Udayana, King of Vatsa (roughly Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh), has made a casual assertion that even animals go to each other for protection. Yogeshvara challenges him to provide an example, so the wise minister tells him about a mouse that once lived at the bottom of a banyan tree.
Viking raider Olaf Tryggvason, newly converted to Christianity, threw his weight behind a Danish invasion of England.
After converting to Christianity, Olaf Tryggvason renounced his career as a self-employed pagan pirate. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that six years later he felt free to ally himself with King Sweyn of Denmark, a Christian, and challenge Ethelred the Unready for the English crown.