1237
The future hero of Waterloo dealt with political ambush as comfortably as he dealt with the military kind.
Arthur Wellesley spent the years 1797 to 1804 in India. He went out as a Colonel in the British Army’s 33rd regiment of Foot, and was soon being addressed as General Sir Arthur. On 23rd September 1803, he secured a significant victory over the Maratha Empire at Assaye in the state of Maharashtra, western India.
Posted October 20 2016
1238
English lawyer Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in place of a French aristocrat.
At the height (or depth) of the French Revolution, Sydney Carton has exchanged places and names with aristocrat Charles Darnay, winning just enough time for Darnay and his family to be smuggled to safety in England. As Carton is led to the guillotine, a seamstress condemned to the same fate shares a confidence with him.
Posted October 14 2016
1239
A poem of nostalgia for the sea breezes and yellow gorse of Northumberland.
War-poet Wilfrid Gibson never served abroad, and was in fact accepted for the army only at his fifth application, in 1917. These short verses do not come from his war-themed collections (though many reflect that subject) but from a set remembering Northumberland, the county of his birth in Hexham.
Posted October 11 2016
1240
A meditation on our instinctive love for the place in which we live.
This is just part of a rather longer poem in which Kipling explores the fundamental truth that no mere human can really love everyone and everything equally. That, he says, is why it is both necessary and right that we feel particularly bound to, and responsible for, the place we call home.
Posted October 11 2016
1242
If freedom and democracy are to have any meaning, the public must be able to talk back to their governors.
The euphoria that followed the Allied victory over Nazi Germany four years earlier had not clouded schoolmaster NL Clay’s wits. In Straightforward English (1949), a guide ‘designed to help an ordinary person to write a clear message’, he told the British public that we must speak plainly and never be satisfied with slogans or jargon, or we would find ourselves walking down the same unhappy road as the Germans.
Posted October 8 2016