The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Eurystheus sends his cousin on another labour, this time hoping the task is too delicate for the big man.
Heracles has now performed two labours for his cousin and rival Eurystheus, slaying the fearsome Lion of Nemea and the many-headed, venomous Hydra of Lerna. From the safety of his palace, however, Eurystheus is disputing the validity of the second.
The fate of the British army hung by a thread in May 1940, but ships large and small, military and civilian, came to the rescue.
Just months into the Second World War, the bulk of the British army was holed up in Dunkirk in May 1940 with nowhere to run. In one of the great what-ifs of history, Adolf Hitler hesitated, handing the Royal Navy a week in which to mount a famous rescue mission.
Harriet Smith’s school gave her a grounding in good sense that even Emma Woodhouse could not quite overthrow.
‘Emma’, like Jane Austen’s other novels, is essentially about the effects of bad education, that is, an upbringing from which good role-models have been absent, and in which theory is an accepted substitute for results. Here, she describes Harriet Smith’s school - the one she attended before ‘handsome, clever, and rich’ Emma Woodhouse tried to improve her.
Irish monk St Columba is credited with being among the first witnesses to the ‘Loch Ness monster’.
Columba brought twelve monks to Iona in 563, and set about converting the pagans of Scotland. Two years into his mission, his labours took him and the monk Lugne Mocumin, whom he had cured of a persistent nosebleed, to the River Ness at the eastern end of the famous Loch.