The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Governments must not use ‘the good of society’ as an excuse to run our lives.
In 1803, William Wilberforce threw his weight behind compuslory vaccination for smallpox, declaring that those who refused it were endangering society. William Cobbett replied with an open letter, in which he wondered whether any Government could resist applying the same logic to every habit, preference or opinion they could label as a social menace.
In Russia, when a blind beggar is laid to rest even the Emperor knows for whom the bell tolls.
Olga Novikova came to London in 1868. In 1916, when she published Russian Memories, the Russians were our allies in the Great War, and our pro-German, anti-Russian politics of the last fifty years was looking a little stale. Novikova told us a touching anecdote of the late Emperor Nicholas I, whom we knew only as the Russian leader we had fought in the Crimean War of 1854-56.
Guiseppi Garibaldi treasured the memory of a visit to Tyneside.
In 1854, Guiseppi Garibaldi found himself an outcast across Europe for his campaign to unite Italy’s small states (some under foreign control) in a single country. He found friends in the US and on his return, his ship called into Newcastle-upon-Tyne for coal. Joseph Cowen Jr came aboard to present him with a ceremonial sword inscribed ‘To General Garibaldi, by the people of Tyneside, friends of European freedom’.
Fyodor Dostoevsky listened with growing bewilderment to the celebrity peace activists gathered in Geneva.
On September 9th-12th, 1867, some of the noisiest political activists of the day, including Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Victor Hugo and Guiseppi Garibaldi, gathered in Geneva for the inaugural Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom. In a letter to his niece, Sofia Alexandrovna, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky complained that they had a peculiar notion of peace.
Izaak Walton recalls how George Herbert summarised the major feasts of the Church year.
From 1630 to his tragically early death just three years later, George Herbert was parish clergyman in Bemerton, Wiltshire. Sensitive and artistic, but stubborn in good principles, he was much loved by his parishioners. Here, Izaak Walton recalls how Herbert expounded the purpose and chief feasts of the Christian calendar, from Christmas to Pentecost.
In a sermon for Christmas Day, St Bede confronts his brethren with the truth about Mary’s wonderful child.
In his Gospel, St John tells us that Mary’s child was actually God himself. From early times, the shock of this simple proposition was too much, even for very senior clergy, and they retreated into hair-splitting qualifications to escape it. The eighth-century English monk Bede, in a Christmas sermon, reminded his brethren of what happened to that child later.