Read short passages similar to those NL Clay collected in his anthologies, to gain a feeling for the language, history and culture of the English-speaking world.
In The Copybook
Read short passages similar to those NL Clay collected in his anthologies, to gain a feeling for the language, history and culture of the English-speaking world.
In The Copybook
Following an appalling atrocity in fourth-century Thessalonica, two strong and determined men refused to back down.
Theodosius I ruled the Roman Empire from 379 to 395. He was the first to adopt Christianity as the State religion, and an Orthodox believer who rejected Arianism, a heresy that Bede described as a ‘high-road of pestilence’ for every other. But Theodosius was also an absolute ruler, whose word was law, and to be a Bishop in his Imperial Church demanded a great deal of courage.
The Tilers and Thatchers of fourteenth-century York tell how Joseph and Mary fared after they were turned away by the innkeepers of Bethlehem.
From at least the 1370s, a series of pageants was put on in the city of York for Corpus Christi, a summertime Church festival dedicated to the Eucharist. Dramatising the life of Jesus Christ, the plays were performed by members of the Guilds of skilled trades or ‘mysteries’ (hence ‘mystery plays’). The Nativity fell to the Tilers and Thatchers, who began with Joseph and Mary trying to settle into a tumbledown Bethlehem stable.
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Arthur Clutton-Brock complained that idealising Shakespeare had made him dull.
Arthur Clutton-Brock was, for many years, art critic for the Times, and knew something of the artistic temperament. On the tercentenary of the death of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), he deplored the way that Shakespeare had been turned into a National Institution.
Lieutenant John Pasco not only flew the most famous signal in British history, he helped write it.
On October 21st, 1805, the Royal Navy crushed a French and Spanish fleet at Cape Trafalgar, Spain. This permanently deprived Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor, of sea-power, and ended his hopes of conquering Britain. Though Admiral Nelson died that day, his call to arms remains one of the best-known sentences in the English language. Here, Lieutenant John Pasco recalls how it was made.
Prince Albert regretted the destructive power of the Art Critic.
On May 3rd, 1851, Prince Albert spoke at a dinner in honour of the recently elected President of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793-1865). The present company, the Prince admitted, were better placed to judge Sir Charles as an artist. But thanks to working so closely with him, he had learnt something about their new President that they might not know: how kindly he dealt with other artists.
Robert Pierrepont called heaven to witness that he would never pick a side in the Civil War.
Robert Pierrepont (1584-1623), 1st Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull, sided with Charles I in the Civil War after much debate. Soon afterwards, on July 16th, 1643, he was captured by the Parliamentarians at Gainsborough, and died in a botched rescue attempt. When the war was over, and Charles II had been restored to his throne, Lucy Hutchinson added a strange detail to the Earl’s sad story.
Ben Jonson tells us how we should measure a life well lived.
Ben Jonson’s collection of short poems Underwoods was published in 1640, soon after he died. He tells us that it takes its title from a habit of classical poets, who liked to call their miscellanies ‘Woods’. If Jonson’s earlier poems were his woods, he said, then these little additions were shrubs on the woodland floor. The following lines are a reflection on the value of a life.
Thomas Jefferson recalls the virtues (and a few faults) of the first US President.
In 1814, former US President Thomas Jefferson (who had served from 1801 to 1809) wrote a letter to Walter Jones (1776-1861), a lawyer whom Jefferson had appointed US attorney for the District of Columbia in 1802. In his letter, Jefferson reminisced about George Washington, supreme commander of the American revolutionary army and first President of the USA.