The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Oedipus flees home in an attempt to escape a dreadful prophecy, unware that it is following at his heels.
One of the great myths of ancient Greece, the tragedy of Oedipus tells how the King of Thebes and a shepherd boy each tried to evade their destinies, and how their destinies refused to be changed.
A Turkish official was itching to know the secret behind a Russian slave girl’s personal charm.
In 1453, Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, fell to the Ottomon Turks. The new rulers thereafter grudgingly tolerated the conquered people’s religion, but forbade any Muslim to join them under pain of death. That was still true under Sultan Mehmed IV, who ruled from 1648 to 1687 (a contemporary of King Charles II).
A heartfelt plea for humility at the height of Britain’s Empire.
Kipling wrote ‘Recessional’ for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, calling for humility at the height of Empire, and warning that control over other nations cannot be held for long through coercive government. Germany was at that very moment arming itself to make a grab for empire, and the consequences would soon bear out Kipling’s words at terrible cost.
A kind of Aesop’s Fable in verse, about mutual respect among those with different talents.
This Aesop-style fable was composed in Latin by schoolmaster Vincent Bourne (1695-1747) and later translated by his pupil William Cowper (pronounced ‘cooper’), one of Jane Austen’s favourite poets, and a devout Christian remembered for his tireless campaign against slavery. A rather self-important nightingale is taught a lesson in humility and mutual respect by a little glow-worm.
Allan Quartermain goes in search of a lost tourist and a legendary hoard of diamonds.
‘King Solomon’s Mines’ was published in 1885, and written in open admiration of Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’. It is recognised as spawning the ‘lost world’ genre of novels and movies, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories to ‘Indiana Jones’.
Elfric, the tenth-century English abbot, suggests a practical way of thinking about the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.
Where ancient Judaism favoured the close regulation of society and individual actions by the state, Christianity emphasises individual responsibility, a major influence on the Britain’s famously liberal constitution. Elfric, Abbot of Eynsham in the reign of Æthelred the Unready, gave a rather clever example of how this works in a sermon for Candlemas, kept each year on February 2nd.