1015
One week into a Lenten retreat with the Bishop of Hexham, a boy’s miserable life is turned right around.
Bishop John of Hexham (?-721) is better known today as St John of Beverley, as he had been Abbot of the monastery in Beverley, North Yorkshire, before being elevated to the See of Hexham. His contemporary Bede was a great admirer, and told this story of him.
Posted October 4 2017
1016
A celebration of St Michael, captain of heaven’s angel host, courteous warrior, and healer.
St Michael is the supreme general of all the angels of God, a figure attested in the Book of Daniel, the Epistle of Jude, and the Revelation of St John the Divine, as well as in Rabbinic literature. In the time of St Bede, as still today in the Eastern Churches, he was associated with healing and a safe passage to heaven.
Posted October 2 2017
1017
A faithful but unprepossessing pet is turned out of hearth and home.
This Russian folktale is a story about a tom cat who is abandoned by his fastidious owner, but shows all the philosophical resilience of cats, and reinvents himself as Cat Ivanovitch, Head Forester of all the animals of the wood. But he could not have done it without the help of a little vixen called Lisabeta, and a good deal of luck.
Posted September 30 2017
1018
As Japan’s ruling shoguns resist the tide of progress, a Nagasaki-based Scottish entrepreneur steps in.
The story of Japan’s first railway is bound up with the story of the country’s emergence from two centuries of self-imposed isolation. It is a tale in which the British played an important role, from engineer Edmund Morel to Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant and railway enthusiast who took considerable risks to forge Japan’s lasting ties with the British Isles.
Posted September 26 2017
1019
Composer Ethel Smyth buys a new-fangled ladies’ bicycle, and scandalises the neighbours.
Ethel Smyth (to rhyme with ‘Forsyth’) was a successful composer of opera and orchestral music, whose lightly-written memoirs – she was acquainted with Brahms, Grieg and several other public figures in music – were also well received. Here, she recalls her scandalous purchase of a ladies’ bicycle in 1894.
Posted September 24 2017
1020
Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, and it turns out that she has been using words wrong all her life.
Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty exhibits all the pride that goeth before his famous fall, and also the same proprietary attitude to the meaning of words fashionable in Westminster. Here, he has just boasted of his ‘un-birthday present’ from the White King and Queen, and Alice is puzzled.
Posted September 22 2017