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 unsung surveyor from Cheshire, who built railways and made friends across the world.
The Victorian railway engineer Thomas Brassey (1805-1870) is not the household name that he perhaps ought to be, chiefly because he worked through agents and alongside partners. Nonetheless, his knowledge and business acumen lies behind much of the rail network in Britain, and helped start the railway revolution from France to Australia.
William Gladstone warns voters not to leave foreign policy in the hands of interventionist politicians.
In a speech in Scotland in 1879, William Gladstone apologised for raising the subject of Foreign Policy, but explained that ordinary voters cannot afford to ignore such matters. Once Britain starts meddling in international affairs, the result will be war, and taxpayers foot the bill.
William Gladstone explains that a truly ‘exceptional nation’ respects the equality and rights of all nations.
In 1879, William Gladstone MP berated his rival Benjamin Disraeli, the Prime Minister, for turning Russia into Europe’s bogeyman. Patriotism, Gladstone said, is a healthy thing, but the true patriot is generous, and never claims for his own country rights and dignities he denies to others.
George Stephenson won the admiration of French navvies by showing them how a Geordie works a shovel.
George Stephenson was arguably history’s most influential engineer, yet he never really gave up being a Northumberland miner. He always retained his Geordie ordinariness, and was never happier than when he was among his fellow working men.
Lemuel Gulliver finds that the people of Balnibarbi just don’t appreciate their hardworking academics.
Lemuel Gulliver is visiting the distinguished Academy in Balnibarbi, where absent-minded professors pursue countless schemes for bettering society. In the School of Languages, for example, some experts plan to do away with verbs, participles and words of more than one syllable, but their colleagues are far bolder.
By the early eighth century, sacred art was thriving in newly-Christian England, but in the East seeds of doubt and confusion had been sown.
Although we associate icons with Eastern Christianity, many churches in Britain prior to the Reformation, and especially in the Anglo-Saxon era before the Conquest of 1066, were wall-to-wall, floor-to-roof, a patchwork of frescoes of saints, Biblical scenes, flowers and animals. Indeed, it was in the East that doubts about sacred art first arose.