Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
By an anonymous artist, via the Wellcome Collection and Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
In eighteenth-century England, the death penalty was the solution to almost any crime.
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By James Peale (1749–1831), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Anne Thackeray saw something satisfying in the self-control of Anne Elliot.
By Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
The beginning of Robert Southey’s classic fairy tale.
By Dmitry Levitzky (1735-1822), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
A Russian princess admitted defeat with a most gracious compliment.
By Nikolai Yaroshenko (1846-1898), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Edith Nesbit brings down the curtain on ‘The Railway Children’.
By Donaldson Brothers, Five Points, NY, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Governments must not use ‘the good of society’ as an excuse to run our lives.