This page is an index to all 1617 posts in The Copy Book.
The Copy Book is an ever-growing library of short passages from history and literature, intended for practice in paraphrase and précis or simply for reading pleasure. They include brief summaries and eyewitness accounts of major events in our national history, and extracts from fables, poetry, plays, novels, political speeches and biography. Many were included by NL Clay in his anthologies of ‘straightforward English’.
You can keep up-to-date with new posts, and discover old posts you may have missed, with the Clay Lane Blog, where you will also find a selection of word games and exercises in grammar and composition.
The posts are currently listed most recent first. Use the buttons below to sort the posts alphabetically, or shuffle the list so you can find posts from right across the collection.
1 ★ For Today
William the Conqueror’s purge of the English Church was halted by a humble bishop and a dead king.
After the Conquest in 1066, William of Normandy appointed an Italian, Lanfranc, as Archbishop of Canterbury, and set about clearing out the English bishops. Wulfstan was the last, stubbornly protecting the English from their new masters, and it seemed God was on the side of the old religion, too.
Posted July 7 2016
Archive
2
John Wood shares the wonder of the Indian cobra’s hood, in science and in myth.
By profession, JG Wood was a clergyman, but he had a gift for making science accessible to ordinary people. From the early 1850s, he was in demand as an author and lecturer on natural history both at home and abroad: he delivered the prestigious Lowell Lectures in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1883-84. In this passage, he takes a look at the hooded cobra, in the light of anatomy and of India’s sacred legends.
Posted Yesterday
3
Silas Marner has to harden his heart and teach little Eppie a lesson she will remember.
Silas Marner has suffered griefs enough to break any man. His salvation has been a little girl: the bachelor had found her in his home, and her mother dead in the snow outside, one New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t easy to juggle a weaver’s work and a curious toddler. One day the artful creature found his scissors, snipped through the linen-band harness he had made for her safe-keeping, and wandered unnoticed out of the cottage.
Posted January 20
4
Dostoevsky had to break it to Moscow’s students that ordinary Russians found their brand of politics patronising.
On April 3rd, 1878, a group of students was beaten up by the locals during a Moscow demonstration. Fyodor Dostoevsky, responding to their plea for sympathy, replied as nicely as he could that the public just didn’t see students as their friends. They saw them as foreign agents, the tools of pro-Western elites who didn’t understand the people — and worse, didn’t respect them.
Posted January 19
5
On his visits to Durham Gaol, prison reformer John Howard found conditions that were all too familiar.
‘There’s Nae Good Luck in Durham Gaol’ was the title of a music-hall song by Tyneside song-maker Tommy Armstrong (1848-1919). It would have been scant consolation to know it, but conditions in the 1770s were far worse than in Tommy’s day. Here, pioneering prison reformer John Howard takes us on a very personal guided tour.
Posted January 15
6
Reading and writing should have taught the people more than name-calling and how to manipulate opinion.
The spread of literacy, said William Hazlitt, should have taught us judgment and taste. Instead, it has taught us how to heap hurtful abuse on anyone who makes us feel challenged or humbled. Critics lavish praise on writers who sneer with them in all the right places, and then suddenly destroy them in the most public fashion — and the reading public laps it up.
Posted January 13
7
‘Alpha of the Plough’ hoped Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not treat his old friends as he treated his favourite books.
As a rule, people who write well are also well-read, but it should not be supposed that they keep up with everything new that hits the shelves or receives breathless praise in the press. Alfred Gardiner, columnist for the Star, was like many professional writers suspicious of new titles, and preferred the company of characters he had come to know well.
Posted January 12