Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Photo by Jensens, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
Cicero warns those who seek power through civic unrest that they will never be the beneficiaries of it.
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© Martinvl, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Church, mother Nature and free markets had almost done for slavery at home when colonies in the New World brought it back.
From Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
Fatherless teenage tearaway Fowell Buxton was not a promising boy, but the Gurney family changed all that.
Preventing the German fleet from breaking out into the Atlantic in 1916 should have felt like victory, but it felt like defeat.
© Leandro Neumann Ciuffo, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.
In 1910, Constantine Zervakos, a young monk from the Greek island of Paros, found himself charged with espionage.
© Fanny Schertzer, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0.
John Heathcoat’s lace-making machine created thousands of jobs, and gave ordinary people clothes they could never have dreamt of.