Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
A young Jewish girl is chosen as the Queen of Persia, but quickly finds she has enemies.
The story of Esther is the story behind the Jewish feast of Purim on the 14th of Adar, which falls in February-March. The tale is set in the 480s BC, following Persia’s conquest of Babylon, when the Kings of Persia became lords over Jewish people scattered right across the ancient Near East.
John Kapodistrias had an instinct for how a long-oppressed people might think.
In 1821, the people of Greece rose up against the Ottoman Empire that had conquered the ailing Roman Empire and its dependent territories in 1453. Life under the Turkish yoke had been hard, and John Kapodistrias, the man chosen by the Greeks in 1827 to lead their newly liberated nation, faced daunting problems of industry and education, but on his first arrival he had a more pressing issue: food.
Within little more than half a century a British penal colony turned into a prosperous, free-trade democracy.
Australia is a partner to be proud of: a sovereign constitutional monarchy with our Queen as Head of State, a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, and a prosperous democracy built on and dedicated to free trade that gave us priceless support in two world wars.
The mother of the Roman Emperor goes to Jerusalem on a quest close to her heart.
In AD 326 Helen, mother of Emperor Constantine the Great, went to the Holy Land to search for the cross on which Jesus Christ had been crucified. The story is told in one of the oldest pieces of English literature, the epic Anglo-Saxon poem ‘Helen’ by Cynewulf.
The closure of slave plantations following the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833 had a curious side-effect.
One might imagine that slave labour keeps prices down, but the break-up of the slave trade by the British Empire following the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833 demonstrated just how mistaken that supposition is. Low prices come when free people do business together: more freedom, more business, lower prices.
Britain’s desperate defence against a much larger, better-prepared military machine was a costly victory.
The Battle of Britain took place in the summer of 1940, when the German Luftwaffe launched a frenzied attack first on the RAF, and then on civilians in London. In targeting London, however, Adolf Hitler allowed the overstretched RAF time to rebuild, a shift in policy that ultimately cost him dearly.