The Copybook

Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.

1285
The Rewards of Treachery Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero warns those who seek power through civic unrest that they will never be the beneficiaries of it.

In 63 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) accused Lucius Sergius Catilina of scheming to overthrow the Republic. In exposing the plot, he warned the Senate against five kinds of political troublemaker, including those who stir up ill-feeling and violence at home, hoping to be the beneficiaries of it.

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1286
How Britain Abolished Slavery Clay Lane

The Church, mother Nature and free markets had almost done for slavery at home when colonies in the New World brought it back.

Landmark anti-slavery legislation in 1807 and 1833, said Russian writer Aleksey Khomiakov, had earned England the gratitude of the whole human race. But it had not always been like this. True, by Elizabethan times the Church (with a little help from Mother Nature and the free market) had all but plucked the weed of slavery from our soil; but in our New World colonies, it was soon starting to run riot.

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1287
The Obstinacy of Fowell Buxton Clay Lane

Fatherless teenage tearaway Fowell Buxton was not a promising boy, but the Gurney family changed all that.

William Wilberforce’s retirement in 1825 left a vacancy for the Commons’ leading anti-slavery campaigner. The man who stepped into his shoes, decrying slavery as ‘repugnant to the principles of the British constitution and of the Christian religion’, was Fowell Buxton (1786-1845), and few who knew him as a child could have believed it.

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1288
The Battle of Jutland Clay Lane

Preventing the German fleet from breaking out into the Atlantic in 1916 should have felt like victory, but it felt like defeat.

The Battle of Jutland in 1916 was the only major engagement between the German and British fleets during the Great War. That was partly a consequence of the damage inflicted on the German fleet, effectively neutralising it; but British losses were actually higher, and the victory felt like defeat.

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1289
The Spy Clay Lane

In 1910, Constantine Zervakos, a young monk from the Greek island of Paros, found himself charged with espionage.

Until 1912, the city and port of Thessalonica was in the hands of the Muslim Turks, and any Greek, especially a Christian, took his life in his hands passing through. In 1910, a newly-minted monk of the Longovarda monastery on Paros got himself into very hot water.

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1290
Heathcoat’s Bobbinet Clay Lane

John Heathcoat’s lace-making machine created thousands of jobs, and gave ordinary people clothes they could never have dreamt of.

The industrial revolution improved the living standards of the poor not by robbing Peter to pay Paul, but by making Peter’s luxuries so cheap that Paul could afford them too. This win-win arrangement was made possible by the self-sacrifice and determination of inventors like John Heathcoat (1783-1861).

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