This page is an index to all 1643 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 in A-Z order. Use the buttons below to show the most recent posts first, or shuffle the list so you can find posts from right across the collection.
1 ★ For Today
Today, the slave trade is a £150bn global business. Back in the late 18th century, it was making a lot of influential people very rich too, but some in England were determined to stop it.
Today, the slave trade is a £150bn global business. Back in the late 18th century, it was making a lot of influential people very rich too, but some in England were determined to stop it.
Picture: From Wikimedia Commons.. Source.
Posted March 13 2015
2 ★ For Today
The invention of the steamboat was a formidable challenge not just of engineering, but of politics and finance.
Steam power came to rivers and lakes even before it came to railways. Exactly who was ‘first’ is often debated, but the short answer is that a Frenchman was the first to try it, a Scotsman was the first to make it work, and an American was the first to make a profit from it.
★ On This Day • March 28 ns • 1 post
William Symington’s ‘Charlotte Dundas’ successfully tested (1803)
Picture: By D. M. Duggan Thacker, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted January 31 2017
3
The Victorian practice of hanging sugared nuts on a Christmas tree was bursting with Biblical symbolism.
Victorian Christmas celebrations included hanging nuts, typically sugared almonds, on the tree. This symbolic gesture goes back to a Christian interpretation of a passage from Numbers, which was known in England as long ago as the 10th century.
Picture: © Fabio Straniero, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted December 12 2016
4
A guide loses his way on the edge of the merciless Egyptian desert, but Abba John is too kind-hearted to tell him.
Abba John Colobus (?339-?405), sometimes called John the Dwarf, was a monk and abbot of a monstery in Scetis in western Egypt, on the edge of the desert. Remembered today mostly for an act of remarkable obedience, in this short tale he teaches another important virtue: tact.
Picture: © MSMRE, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0.. Source.
Posted October 14 2018
5
John Clayton, a British colonial official lost in the African jungle, is caught unawares by Kerchak, the gorilla.
In 1888 (so begins Tarzan of the Apes) colonial official John Clayton and his pregnant wife Alice took ship for west Africa, only to be put ashore in the uncharted jungle by mutineers. For a year after baby John was born, his father defied repeated attacks upon the family’s rough hut by a troop of gorillas. But last night Alice died; and this morning her grieving husband was caught unready.
Picture: Abigail Brodsky, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.
Posted September 7 2022
6
The Dutch explorer ran across two islands in the Pacific of which Europeans knew nothing, but his chief desire was to get past them.
New Zealand came under British control with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; James Cook had charted its coasts in the 1770s, but Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had set the first European eyes on the islands, over a century before. As William Reeves notes, however, he was interested only in getting past them.
Picture: © Krzysztof Golik, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.
Posted December 28 2018
7
To the poor of England, the Worcestershire man gave affordable pots and pans, and to all the world he gave the industrial revolution.
Seventeenth-century England’s industrial productivity had stalled. Her forests could no longer supply charcoal for smelting; iron was mostly imported from Russia and Sweden; fine metal kitchenware was a luxury of the rich. Government funded various barren initiatives, but Worcestershire entrepreneur Abraham Darby (1678-1717) made the breakthrough.
Picture: © Basher Eyre, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted August 12 2017
8
Sir John Seeley urged us to cherish our close ties to India and other nations beyond Europe.
Victorian essayist and historian Sir John Seeley urged his readers to think more about our ties of language, blood, culture and history with the countries of our loose and far-flung Empire, and less about ‘little England’ and her mere geographical proximity to Continental Europe.
Picture: © Hertzsprung, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.
Posted January 3 2018