The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Wilfrid Israel used his Berlin department store as cover for smuggling thousands of Jewish children to safety in Britain.
Wilfrid Israel (1899-1943) was a wealthy German retailer, who used his business as a cover to bring thousands of Jewish children to Britain in the run-up to the Second World War, saving them from ‘deportation, extermination and annihilation’ - words thought too melodramatic at the time, but only too accurate.
An enterprising knight rids the Bishop of Durham of a troublesome boar, but the price comes as a shock to his lordship.
The Pollards were gentry with land near Auckland Castle, seat of the Bishops of Durham. By tradition, each new Bishop of Durham was presented by the Pollards with a handsome falchion (a kind of sword), accompanied by a speech recalling how an ancestor ‘slew of old a mighty boar, and by performing this service we hold our lands.’
To do one’s duty is to peep into the mystery of life, and taste reward from another world.
Samuel Smiles closed his book devoted to character with a reflection on doing one’s duty — meaning neither the bare minimum required by law, nor slavish obedience to authority, but the mysterious, often elusive task which God has entrusted to each one of us.
Sir Walter’s dizzy life brought him fame and fortune in dangerous places, the most dangerous of which was Court.
Walter Raleigh was, by his own admission, ‘a man full of all vanity, having been a soldier, a captain, a sea captain, and a courtier, which are all places of wickedness and vice.’ But it was all on such a grand scale that he has become one of the most popular figures of England’s stylish Tudor Age.
Snaring a wild boar turns out to be much less dangerous than keeping centaurs away from their wine.
Heracles is performing a series of ‘Labours’ for King Eurystheus, who regards his cousin as a rival and would not be sorry to see him dead. But ever since Heracles came back wearing the pelt of the Nemean Lion, Eurystheus’s nerves have been jangling and he now keeps a capacious wine-jar, half buried in the ground, as a place of refuge.
After the Great War, the British Government did keep one of her many wartime promises to her allies.
In a letter dated November 2nd, 1917, towards the end of the Great War, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour assured prominent banker Lord Rothschild that the British Government would do what it could to carve out a homeland for Jewish people in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. The promise was kept, and this is how the Colonial Office List for 1946 summarised the formation of British Mandatory Palestine.