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 gifted composer of classical music in the romantic tradition, admired by Stanford, Elgar, and Sullivan.
Daniel Taylor, a medical doctor who was later a coroner and magistrate in the Gambia, had a brief affair with an unmarried woman in London named Alice Martin. The result was a boy she named Samuel Coleridge Taylor, after the famous poet (it was Samuel who hyphenated it as Coleridge-Taylor).
Edward Elgar suffered from depression, and ‘Nimrod’ is his token of thanks to the true friend who supported him through it.
By far the best-known of all Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ is ‘Nimrod’, frequently played at Remembrance services and funerals. But the story behind it suggests that it was intended as music not of loss or parting, but of enduring friendship, and new hope.
Moscheles taught his adopted country how to write enchanting music for decades to come.
Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870) was a Czech composer who came to England in the 1820s and instantly felt at home. England warmed just as quickly to him, and he became a kind of godfather to a generation of Victorian composers writing particularly tuneful music.
A ‘Christian’ mob kidnapped and murdered a much-loved professor of mathematics - for her politics.
Hypatia was head of the Philosophical School in Alexandria. She was a very likeable mathematician and astronomer, who numbered pagans, Jews, and several Christian clergymen among her past and present students.