Fiction

Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Fiction’

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Mr Ivery Gets Away John Buchan

Richard Hannay tracks a German spy down to a French château, but Hannay’s sense of fair play gives his enemy a chance.

Richard Hannay and Mary Lamington are on the tail of a German spy, who has been posing as an English gentleman named Moxon Ivery during the Great War. The chase has led to a French château, where Mary has uncovered a cache of biological weapons, and now Hannay has surprised the man himself.

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1
The Water Truce Rudyard Kipling

The animals in the jungle agree that amidst the drought, the sport of hunter and hunted has to be suspended.

In Rudyard Kipling’s story The Jungle Book, a prolonged drought has left Mowgli and the animals with no food and little water. The waterhole has sunk so low that the Peace Rock is showing, and Hathi, the elephant, has called the Water Truce so hunter and hunted alike can drink. As dusk falls, the truce is holding — though Bagheera, the black panther, isn’t much help.

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2
A Glide Into the Future H. G. Wells

A dinner host enthralls his guests with an extraordinary scientific experiment.

HG Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) opens with ‘the Time Traveller’ holding forth over the dinner table on the subject of Time as the fourth dimension, and the possibility of time travel. His guests are reluctant to follow where he leads, so he runs to his workshop and returns with a tiny, intricate mechanism in brass and ivory.

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3
The Abduction of Tarzan Edgar Rice Burroughs

John Clayton, a British colonial official lost in the African jungle, is caught unawares by Kerchak, the gorilla.

In 1888 (so begins Tarzan of the Apes) colonial official John Clayton and his pregnant wife Alice took ship for west Africa, only to be put ashore in the uncharted jungle by mutineers. For a year after baby John was born, his father defied repeated attacks upon the family’s rough hut by a troop of gorillas. But last night Alice died; and this morning her grieving husband was caught unready.

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4
Economy – With a Dash of Love Wilkie Collins

Gabriel Betteredge’s cottage was cosy, his employment rewarding and his status respectable, but his cup of happiness was not quite full.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is a detective story (arguably the first) about a mysterious gem, told in the form of a series of narratives by different writers. One of these is Gabriel Betteredge, who digresses into a reminiscence about his bachelor days and how he met his future wife. At the time, he had just found a very comfortable position as bailiff to Sir John and Lady Julia Verinder.

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5
Messing About in Boats Kenneth Grahame

Mole is enjoying the most wonderful Spring morning, skipping his chores and going for a row with Rat.

The Mole has emerged from his winter burrow one fine morning at the beginning of Spring. After scampering off carelessly, leaving spring-cleaning far behind, he finds himself for the first time in his life at the River. Mole’s expert eye falls on a small round opening near the water’s edge, and he is just thinking that it would make a nice burrow when he realises that there is a small, round face framed in it.

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6
Carry Opinion With You Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

Britain’s first qualified female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, had a message for the first women to study for London University’s degree in medicine.

On October 1st, 1877, Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson gave the Inaugural Address at the London School of Medicine for Women, which she had helped to establish three years earlier. Only the previous year, the UK Medical Act had allowed the country’s medical authorities to license women as doctors for the first time, and it is difficult to think of better advice to anyone hoping to bring about important social change.

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