The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
A young man from the Italian city on the Adige River demonstrates that class has nothing to do with wealth.
Samuel Smiles’s ‘Self-Help’ enthusiastically encouraged working men to take advantage of Britain’s entrepreneurial economy. Yet he never once promised riches; he promised dignity and self-respect, and told this tale to illustrate their superiority.
English lawyer Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in place of a French aristocrat.
At the height (or depth) of the French Revolution, Sydney Carton has exchanged places and names with aristocrat Charles Darnay, winning just enough time for Darnay and his family to be smuggled to safety in England. As Carton is led to the guillotine, a seamstress condemned to the same fate shares a confidence with him.
A poem of nostalgia for the sea breezes and yellow gorse of Northumberland.
War-poet Wilfrid Gibson never served abroad, and was in fact accepted for the army only at his fifth application, in 1917. These short verses do not come from his war-themed collections (though many reflect that subject) but from a set remembering Northumberland, the county of his birth in Hexham.
A meditation on our instinctive love for the place in which we live.
This is just part of a rather longer poem in which Kipling explores the fundamental truth that no mere human can really love everyone and everything equally. That, he says, is why it is both necessary and right that we feel particularly bound to, and responsible for, the place we call home.
If freedom and democracy are to have any meaning, the public must be able to talk back to their governors.
The euphoria that followed the Allied victory over Nazi Germany four years earlier had not clouded schoolmaster NL Clay’s wits. In Straightforward English (1949), a guide ‘designed to help an ordinary person to write a clear message’, he told the British public that we must speak plainly and never be satisfied with slogans or jargon, or we would find ourselves walking down the same unhappy road as the Germans.