Clay Lane

A giant gets angry when he finds children playing in his garden.

A giant has been staying with his friend the Cornish ogre; but after seven years he has run out of conversation, and come home.

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Pygmalion discovered that prudishness is not the same as purity.

Pygmalion assumed that Aphrodite, goddess of pure love, would bless a romance free from fleshly passion, but he had misunderstood the true meaning of purity.

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A tale of two friends with complete confidence in each other, and loyal to the death.

Dionysius, tyrant of the island of Sicily (probably Dionysius I, r. 405-367 BC), was deeply impressed by the bond of trust shared by Pythias and Damon. Given how he came to find out about it, though, it is understandable that they thought three would make a crowd.

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Alexander fulfilled the letter of a prophecy and he did become ruler of the world, but it wasn’t quite fair.

To ‘cut the Gordian knot’ is to solve an apparently intractable problem simply, by lateral thinking. I’m not sure, however, that Alexander really ‘solved’ the problem at all.

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An ancient Greek myth about the dangers of easy wealth.

The ‘Midas Touch’ is the ability to make a success of anything to which you turn your hand, but the original myth carries a warning.

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The great-grandson of William the Conqueror, whose knights assassinated Thomas Becket and whose family harried him to an early grave.

Henry II was the grandson of Henry I and the great-grandson of William the Conqueror, and spent much of his life in the French estates he inherited from them. Henry managed to restore order to a country torn apart by almost thirty years of civil war, but is remembered today chiefly for a bitter dispute with Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

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