The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
In January 1807, newspapers breathlessly reported that Napoleon Bonaparte’s rampage across Europe was at an end — but was it true?
In January 1807, as Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies swept across the Continent building his French Empire, British newspapers printed a cheering story about how the Russians had inflicted a calamitous defeat on Napoleon. William Cobbett didn’t believe a word of it, and expressed his doubts in a masterly metaphor which made ‘red herrings’ into a household proverb.
When Saint-Mars arrived to take over as warden of the Bastille in 1698, staff at Paris’s most famous prison had eyes only for his prisoner.
When in 1660 King Charles II quitted the French court and returned to England, the parliamentary restraints laid upon him left Louis XIV aghast, and the ‘Sun King’ made sure to radiate his power through a network of chosen ministers, soldiers, civil servants and innumerable spies. Many illustrious names were gaoled without appeal or hope of release, but the most famous prisoner has no name at all.
The interminable squabbling among the Slavic peoples around the southeast Baltic prompted their leaders to drastic action.
In 865, a large and unwelcome army of Vikings swept across the North Sea, but within sixty years Vikings and English had together established a new, united Kingdom of England. Just three years earlier, the squabbling Slavic peoples of the Baltic’s southeastern shores had actually invited the Vikings over, and within a generation the foundations of Russia had also been laid.
Trapped in Crete with his son Icarus, the craftsman and inventor Daedalus realises a bold and desperate plan to get away.
In a paroxysm of envy, the great craftsman Daedalus murdered his nephew, who seemed likely surpass him in skill, and the sentence of Athens’s highest court was death. Daedalus managed to flee to Crete, but King Minos made life as hateful there as in any prison. So Daedalus fashioned wings for himself and his son Icarus, and prepared to fly to freedom.
Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus urged Fausto Andrelini not to miss out on England’s enchanting contribution to good manners.
Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, first came to England in 1499, a guest of the English court thanks to William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and of John Colet at Oxford. During this time he paid a visit to a country house and learnt to enjoy some quaint English customs, as he told his Parisian friend Fausto Andrelini, poet to Queen Anne of France.
There are solid reasons why countries with lower taxes and less regulation tend to be more prosperous.
Eighteenth-century Britain was by comparison with most of Europe a remarkably free and stable society, and also a driving force behind industrial innovation and economic growth. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon regarded this as cause and effect: countries where government is quiet will be busier, more prosperous and internationally more friendly, and they explained why this will always be so.