The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
William Shakespeare immortalised his lover in verse, as if holding back for ever the ravages of Time.
Without question, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 is one of the best known and most beloved poems in the English language. William immortalises his lover in verse, saying that though beauty must pass away all too soon, she and her loveliness will live on in his lines as long as there are men to read them.
When Raffles Haw comes to sleepy Tamfield, his breathtaking generosity starts turning heads at once, and one belongs to Laura McIntyre.
The first visit of the McIntyres’ new neighbour, free-spending, blue-sky-thinking Raffles Haw, has impressed Laura deeply. He has been upstairs to her brother’s studio and bought two paintings, and even offered to move an unsightly hill for her convenience. Laura’s fiancé Hector, away at sea, is quite forgotten.
From the very first lines, Jane Austen’s classic novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ pokes affectionate fun at Georgian England.
The opening lines of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1813) are arguably the best-loved in all English fiction. In the drawing-room of Longbourn, a gentleman’s residence near the Hertfordshire village of Meryton, pretty but empty-headed Mrs Bennet is all of a flutter because there is a new neighbour in Netherfield Park.
William Shakespeare recalls how the love of his life once teased him to the brink of despair.
This Sonnet is held to be one of William Shakespeare’s earlier works, owing in part to its relatively simple form. However, keen-eyed observers have noted that the husband of Anne Hathaway seems to have buried some tender-hearted little clues in the closing lines.
Literary rumour in the time of Queen Anne said that William Shakespeare owed his extraordinary career to a scurrilous ballad.
The tale of how bad-boy William Shakespeare was chased out of Warwickshire for his scurrilous verses only to find immortality on the London stage is enduringly popular, though modern scholars are sceptical at best. The following account comes from Shakespeare scholar and Poet Laureate Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718).
A benevolent lecturer has to persuade a class of restless girls to stay inside on a rainy day.
John Ruskin’s ‘Ethics of the Dust’ is a series of classroom dialogues inspired by the famous art critic’s visits to Winnington Hall, a girls’ school near Northwich in Cheshire, where he taught Scripture, geology and art, and oversaw cricket matches. Pianist Sir Charles Hallé performed for the girls too, and would surely have enjoyed Ruskin’s musical analogy.