Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

← Page 1

889

St Nicholas Scotches a Rumour

Three highly decorated officers in the Roman Army fall victim to a campaign to discredit them.

From 331, the Praetorian Prefect of the East was Ablabius, making him the most important man in the eastern Roman Empire after the Emperor himself. Originally a pagan from Crete, he became a Christian and was a close confidant of Emperor Constantine. Later, under Constantius, he lost his place and his life for supporting the Orthodox party in the Arian crisis.

Read

Picture: © Țetcu Mircea Rareș, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

890

Recognition

Just as Richard Hannay was steeling himself to report failure in the hunt for a German agent, a stranger’s eye caught his own.

On the eve of the Great War, Richard Hannay has gone to Sir Walter Bullivant’s house in Queen Anne’s Gate to report failure in the search for the ‘Black Stone’ — a German spy and master of disguise whom Hannay alone can identify. Sir Walter, however, is closeted with Lord Alloa, head of the Navy.

Read

Picture: © Colin Smith, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

891

St Nicholas and the Unjust Judge

Trouble comes to the town of Myra when Imperial soldiers are despatched to put down a revolt.

In February 313 the new Roman Emperor, Constantine, and Licinius his junior in the Balkans, decreed religious liberty across the Empire. With astonishing speed, formerly persecuted Christian bishops gained public respect, and if this tale is anything to judge by, deservedly so.

Read

Picture: © Țetcu Mircea Rareș, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

892

Lost for Words

Welsh journalist Henry Stanley is despatched by head office in New York to find a missing British explorer.

In 1865 explorer David Livingstone went in search of the sources of the Nile. Three years passed with no word of his fate, so Welsh journalist Henry Stanley of the New York Herald was despatched to track him down. By the Autumn of 1871 the errand seemed hopeless, but then word came of a white man in Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.

Read

Picture: Photo by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

893

The Machinery of State

Human beings should not be frantic cogs spinning away in the Government’s factory of Progress.

John Buchan contrasted his view of society, as a delicate ecosystem of living plants suited to a particular climate and soil, with the economic abstractions of political experts in Germany and the Soviet Union, for whom people were mere cogs and pistons in the pounding machine of Government.

Read

Picture: © Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R29818, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

894

A Confiscation of Property

Arthur Huntingdon discovers that his wife is planning to leave him, and take their little boy with her.

Arthur Huntingdon is drunken, unfaithful and abusive, and teaching his young son to be like him. His wife Helen has had enough, and plans to take little Arthur to America, supporting herself as an artist of some talent. Unwisely, she has committed her plans to her secret journal, and her husband has just read it.

Read

Picture: By Gillis Hafström (1841-1909), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.