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Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.

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1501
The Gordian Knot by Clay Lane

Alexander fulfilled the letter of a prophecy and he did become ruler of the world, but it wasn’t quite fair.

To ‘cut the Gordian knot’ is to solve an apparently intractable problem simply, by lateral thinking. I’m not sure, however, that Alexander really ‘solved’ the problem at all.

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1502
The Midas Touch by Clay Lane

An ancient Greek myth about the dangers of easy wealth.

The ‘Midas Touch’ is the ability to make a success of anything to which you turn your hand, but the original myth carries a warning.

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1503
The Caucus Race by Lewis Carroll

Alice experiences for herself the very definition of a pointless exercise.

Alice and an assortment of animals have got very wet. A mouse tries to dry them out by reciting a passage from a dry history book, but when this doesn’t work, the Dodo suggests a Caucus Race.

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1504
‘The marriage cannot go on!’ by Charlotte Brontë

The cup of happiness is dashed from Jane Eyre’s lips.

Mr Rochester has proposed to his astonished but delighted governess, Jane Eyre, and the happy couple are now in church, ready to exchange their marriage vows.

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1505
The Peculiar Customs of Lilliput by Jonathan Swift

The people of Lilliput are strangely small, but their ideas are bizarre in a big way.

Lemuel Gulliver has been carried on a strange journey to unknown peoples and cultures, which has now brought him to Lilliput, where the people are barely six inches high.

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1506
King Henry II by Clay Lane

The great-grandson of William the Conqueror, whose knights assassinated Thomas Becket and whose family harried him to an early grave.

Henry II was the grandson of Henry I and the great-grandson of William the Conqueror, and spent much of his life in the French estates he inherited from them. Henry managed to restore order to a country torn apart by almost thirty years of civil war, but is remembered today chiefly for a bitter dispute with Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

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June 11 NS

May 29 OS

The Two Shakespeares : Arthur Clutton-Brock complained that idealising Shakespeare had made him dull.
Fairway : Use each noun below in two sentences, first as the subject, and then as the object of a verb.
England Expects : Lieutenant John Pasco not only flew the most famous signal in British history, he helped write it.
Running Late : Use these adverbial clauses in your own sentences.
Peggy’s Dog : Some lines from the comic verse of Thomas Hood, for reading aloud.
An Interruption : Report this conversation without using direct speech.
Tender Plants : Prince Albert regretted the destructive power of the Art Critic.
Lost for Words : Join these ideas together into a single sentence, using ‘although’ or ‘though’.
Loan Words : Match these words to the language they come from, whether Old Norse, Malay or Welsh.
Evidence : Join these ideas together to form a single sentence, using the relative pronoun ‘who’.
Fatal Vow : Robert Pierrepont called heaven to witness that he would never pick a side in the Civil War.
Lost and Found : What would you in these difficult situations?
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