Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Three years before the Great War, Rudyard Kipling recalled how one English king simply paid his bullying neighbours to stay at home.
In the reign of Ethelred the Unready (r. 978-1016) Viking raiders harassed the people of eastern and southern England so cruelly that the King bribed them to stop. In a verse contribution to CRL Fletcher’s A School History of England (1911), Rudyard Kipling drew the moral for any nation listless enough to buy a quiet life.
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.
Richard Cobden questioned both the wisdom and the motives of politicians who intervene on foreign soil.
At the Vienna Congress in 1815, Napoleon’s former empire was shared out by Britain and other European Powers. A semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland was allotted to Russia, which Russian troops occupied in response to the November Uprising of 1830-31. Calls grew loud for the British and Turkish Empires to restore ‘the balance of power’, but Richard Cobden heard only arrogant self-preservation.
A gentleman travelling home from London by train reached his destination carrying more than he set out with.
In 1830, the world’s first intercity passenger line began running steam-hauled trains between Liverpool and Manchester. Half a century later, Richard Pike compiled a collection of vignettes about life on the ever-growing railway network, some about engineers and locomotives, others about the surprising things that could happen in a railway carriage.
Richard Cobden was not a little envious of the USA’s open and can-do society, but he did not covet her republicanism.
In 1835 the USA stood for strict public economy (that year the national debt hit zero for the first and last time), military restraint, and wise investment of taxpayers’ dollars. These things, Richard Cobden believed, England could usefully copy; but not republicanism. A British republic, he said, she would merely replace one kind of aristocracy with a much less noble one.
Henry VI’s campaign to confirm himself as King of France looked to be in trouble after the Duke of Brittany switched sides.
In 1425, England’s Henry VI and France’s Charles VII were still fighting the Hundred Years’ War for the French crown. That October, John V, Duke of Brittany followed his brother Arthur’s example and backed Charles. The Earl of Salisbury and other English generals replied with raids on Brittany from their base at Saint-James in Normandy, and by February, Arthur could see that brother John needed help.