The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
True moral integrity comes from within.
Henry Crawford has decided it would be fun to break Fanny Price’s heart by making her fall in love with him. He thinks that Fanny, whose life is guided by strict principle, will jump at the chance to mould someone in her own image — thereby revealing how little he understands of principle, or of Fanny.
For two centuries, human traffickers had stolen English men, women and children for the slave-markets of the Arab world.
In the Barbary states of Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli in north Africa, part of the Ottoman Empire, slavery was the norm, and – much as the comforting breadth of the Atlantic did for English slave-owners – the use of European Christians rather than their own brethren allowed Muslims to ease their conscience.
The mild-mannered, artistic monk was nevertheless a founding father of the English nation.
St Bede of Jarrow (673-735) could claim to be one of founding Fathers of the English nation: his ground-breaking ‘History’ helped create a sense of national identity and Christian culture. Artistic yet scientific, jealous of Northumbrian sovereignty yet appreciative of European culture, he exemplifies all that is best in the English people.