Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
© tango7174, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Three fishermen let their tongues run away with them, and were left counting the cost.
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© Jorge Royan, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Handel called it ‘Air and Variations’, but by Charles Dickens’s day everyone knew it as ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’.
From Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
Handel’s anthem sets to glorious music words sung at English coronations for over a thousand years.
© Martin Creek, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.
Handel’s German boss fired the composer for spending all his time in London. When they met again, it was... rather awkward.
© Steve Evans, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.
The first thing George Frideric Handel’s oratorio ‘Messiah’ did was to set a hundred and forty-two prisoners free.
© inharecherche, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.
Lost for seventeen centuries, caught up in a war, and used as a pedestal for a plant pot, this is the world’s oldest surviving song.