Read short passages similar to those NL Clay collected in his anthologies, to gain a feeling for the language, history and culture of the English-speaking world.
In The Copybook
Read short passages similar to those NL Clay collected in his anthologies, to gain a feeling for the language, history and culture of the English-speaking world.
In The Copybook
When Edward III sent the Earl of Salisbury to take her absent husband’s castle, Agnes brushed his attack aside - literally.
In the 14th century, Patrick, ninth Earl of Dunbar, found himself caught between the warring kings of England and Scotland, and survived by frequently changing sides. His wife was made of sterner stuff...
King Philip V of Spain sent a second Spanish Armada against Britain, but it suffered much the same fate as the first.
The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 forbade Philip V of Spain, grandson of Louis XIV of France, to claim the French throne. But his chief minister, Italian cardinal Giulio Alberoni, egged him on, triggering the ‘War of the Quadruple Alliance’.
In 1837 William Sterndale Bennett, then regarded as England’s most exciting young composer, made history in quite another... field.
German club cricket began in 1858, courtesy of British and American expatriates living in Berlin. But there is a much earlier game on record, played in Leipzig on June 10th, 1837. One of the participants was William Sterndale Bennett, a young and promising composer, and inevitably perhaps, a Yorkshireman.
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Dostoevsky had to break it to Moscow’s students that ordinary Russians found their brand of politics patronising.
On April 3rd, 1878, a group of students was beaten up by the locals during a Moscow demonstration. Fyodor Dostoevsky, responding to their plea for sympathy, replied as nicely as he could that the public just didn’t see students as their friends. They saw them as foreign agents, the tools of pro-Western elites who didn’t understand the people — and worse, didn’t respect them.
Arthur Clutton-Brock complained that idealising Shakespeare had made him dull.
Arthur Clutton-Brock was, for many years, art critic for the Times, and knew something of the artistic temperament. On the tercentenary of the death of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), he deplored the way that Shakespeare had been turned into a National Institution.
Lieutenant John Pasco not only flew the most famous signal in British history, he helped write it.
On October 21st, 1805, the Royal Navy crushed a French and Spanish fleet at Cape Trafalgar, Spain. This permanently deprived Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor, of sea-power, and ended his hopes of conquering Britain. Though Admiral Nelson died that day, his call to arms remains one of the best-known sentences in the English language. Here, Lieutenant John Pasco recalls how it was made.
Prince Albert regretted the destructive power of the Art Critic.
On May 3rd, 1851, Prince Albert spoke at a dinner in honour of the recently elected President of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793-1865). The present company, the Prince admitted, were better placed to judge Sir Charles as an artist. But thanks to working so closely with him, he had learnt something about their new President that they might not know: how kindly he dealt with other artists.
Robert Pierrepont called heaven to witness that he would never pick a side in the Civil War.
Robert Pierrepont (1584-1623), 1st Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull, sided with Charles I in the Civil War after much debate. Soon afterwards, on July 16th, 1643, he was captured by the Parliamentarians at Gainsborough, and died in a botched rescue attempt. When the war was over, and Charles II had been restored to his throne, Lucy Hutchinson added a strange detail to the Earl’s sad story.
Ben Jonson tells us how we should measure a life well lived.
Ben Jonson’s collection of short poems Underwoods was published in 1640, soon after he died. He tells us that it takes its title from a habit of classical poets, who liked to call their miscellanies ‘Woods’. If Jonson’s earlier poems were his woods, he said, then these little additions were shrubs on the woodland floor. The following lines are a reflection on the value of a life.
Thomas Jefferson recalls the virtues (and a few faults) of the first US President.
In 1814, former US President Thomas Jefferson (who had served from 1801 to 1809) wrote a letter to Walter Jones (1776-1861), a lawyer whom Jefferson had appointed US attorney for the District of Columbia in 1802. In his letter, Jefferson reminisced about George Washington, supreme commander of the American revolutionary army and first President of the USA.