Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
Pharaoh has the Israelites trapped on the shore of the Red Sea, but God has yet another surprise for him.
Moses has failed to persuade Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt, so he has taken matters into his own hands and brought them out anyway. Pharaoh quickly puts aside grief for his firstborn son, taken by God’s angel of death, and rides after the escaped slaves with vengeance in his heart.
Jochebed hides her baby son from Pharaoh’s soldiers, only for him to be discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter.
The story of Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt begins long ago, perhaps as long ago as the 13th century BC. The children of Jacob have come with Pharaoh’s blessing to Egypt to join their respected brother Joseph, but their descendants have multiplied, and later Pharaohs see them as a burden, even a threat.
James Hargreaves’s historic invention was not without its critics when it first appeared.
James Hargreaves (?1720-1778) was one of a number of eighteenth-century Lancashire inventors who transformed textile production from a cottage handicraft into a mechanised industry. His ‘Spinning Jenny’ of 1764 cleared a bottleneck in cloth production that proved the social benefits of automation and accelerated the industrial revolution.
The Pope and the King of Spain decide that the time has come to rid England of her troublesome Queen, Elizabeth I.
In 1558 Mary I of England, a Catholic married to King Philip II of Spain, died. Her crown passed to her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I, dashing the hopes of Philip and of Pope Pius V for a united Catholic Europe. When Elizabeth began helping persecuted Protestants in the Spanish Netherlands, it was the last straw.
Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens took his wartime protest straight to the top.
In 1941, the Germans invaded Greece, plunging the country into a four-year nightmare of fear, persecution and famine. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews were targeted, but even in the midst of starvation and suspicion the Greeks hid them, found them food, and tried to frustrate the deportations to the camps of Germany and Poland.
A maths prodigy from Madras became so wrapped up in his sums that he forgot to pass his examinations.
In 1914, a young Indian mathematician with no formal qualifications came to England. Some thought his scribbled theorems were a pastiche of half-understood fragments, or even that he was a fraud, but others sensed they were gazing into the depths of one of the most mysterious mathematical minds they had known.