The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
The experienced nurse could not stop saving lives, even at the cost of her own.
The execution of nurse Edith Cavell (1865-1915), an Englishwoman working in a Red Cross hospital in Brussels during the Great War, was one of a number of scandals that did nothing to help the German Empire justify their claim to be the superior civilisation of Europe.
On October 28th, 1940, the Kingdom of Greece surprised everyone by refusing to become part of the German war machine.
By the Autumn of 1940, British forces fighting the Second World War were dangerously overstretched: Paris had fallen, Benito Mussolini had pledged Italy’s support to Germany, and Greece was under a state of emergency, with fascist sympathies.
Two of Heracles’s labours are declared void, so to make up the number he is sent to find the Garden of the Hesperides.
Greek hero Heracles has been appointed ten Labours to atone for killing his children in a fit of madness. The Labours are set by his jealous cousin King Eurystheus, and when he learns that Heracles had help with the many-headed Hydra of Lerna and the Stables of King Augeas, he declares that two more Labours must be performed to make up the number.
The young Roman Emperor Theophilus backed away from marriage to the formidable Cassiani, but he could not forget her.
Cassiani was a nun of noble birth in the Roman Empire’s capital city, Constantinople, during the 9th century. Her gift for poetry and hymn-writing was widely admired, and the Eastern service-books are littered with her works. The most famous is a Hymn for Wednesday in Holy Week, and thereby hangs quite a tale.
Two young English princes were banished to the court of Yaroslav the Wise, and one returned to claim the crown.
Edward the Exile was one of two princes, sons of Edmund Ironside, driven to Kiev after the Danish warrior-king Cnut the Great took their father’s crown in 1016. In 1054, Edward returned to England with his wife and young son Edgar, encouraged by his uncle King Edward the Confessor to believe that he was about to regain his lost throne.
For a hundred years after William the Conqueror came to England, four strong women named Matilda shaped the nation’s history.
From 1066 to 1154, England saw no fewer than four royal women named Matilda, including the wife of William the Conqueror, and the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland. It can be a little confusing working out which one is which, so here is a short guide.