Character and Conduct

Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Character and Conduct’

7
Two Letters Home Sir Edward Hamilton Westrow Hulse

A German soldier stopped the Great War so he could ask Captain Hulse to post a letter for him.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was one of the most poignant events in the Great War of 1914-18. The British had poured into Belgium to help drive the German invaders out, and in Flanders the two armies faced each other from trenches only a few hundred yards apart. In a letter to his mother on December 28th that year, Captain Hulse of the Scots Guards told how the spontaneous truce began.

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8
Dear Anne Elliot Anne Thackeray

Anne Thackeray saw something satisfying in the self-control of Anne Elliot.

Anne Thackeray wondered if the novelists of her own generation (she singled out George Eliot) were bathing the reader in a little too much emotion. Austen’s heroines did not share so intimately, or express so freely, but she had studied their characters more closely. Such a one was Anne Elliot, of Persuasion.

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9
A Man Without a Price Charles Maybury Archer

A Russian princess admitted defeat with a most gracious compliment.

John Smeaton (1724-1792) was an English engineer who made advances in water and steam power, and engineered bridges, canals, harbours and land drainage schemes. Such was his reputation that Empress Catherine of Russia, who had a high regard for English know-how, dangled the lure of her glittering Court and immense treasury in the hope of landing him.

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10
It’s Good to be Merry and Wise A. G. Gardiner

‘Alpha of the Plough’ thought the Victorians understood Christmas and New Year better than we do.

Writing in full knowledge of the horrors of the Great War, columnist Alfred Gardiner found early twentieth-century sneering towards the past a little hard to bear. The kind of progress we had made, he said, had not given us that right, and it was particularly grating to hear the moderns scorn their grandparents’ idea of how to keep Christmas and New Year.

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11
Invictus W. E. Henley

A memorable poem about triumph over adversity.

At twelve, William Henley was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He lost one leg below the knee to the disease in 1868-69, and spent 1873-75 in an Edinburgh infirmary under Joseph Lister’s care. The battering experience drew from Henley one of the most quotable poems in our language, later dedicated to the memory of his friend Robert Hamilton Bruce.

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12
The Dignities of God and Man Mencius

The honours that come from God and those that come from men need to be put in the right order.

Mencius (?371-?289) or ‘Master Meng’ spent his career advising Chinese regional governments on public policy during a low-point in the Zhou Dynasty. Regional barons squabbled, taxed cruelly and chopped off heads, and all was flattery, corruption and ambition. Mencius saw no hope for the State in institutional reforms: each man must undertake his own personal reformation.

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