Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
John Stuart Mill set out three kinds of liberty essential to a truly free society: freedom of conscience, of tastes, and of association.
In his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill has been talking about the proper role of Government, arguing that the State authorities should not meddle in the lives of individual citizens. He now lays out three freedoms essential to any truly liberal society: those of thought, choice and association. Every man should have the freedom to go his own way in life, so long as he extends the same courtesy to his neighbours.
Macaulay recalled an Italian fable about a fairy doomed every now and then to take the form of a snake, and drew from her a lesson about Liberty.
In an essay on John Milton contributed to the Edinburgh Review in 1825, Thomas Babington Macaulay recalled a fable by Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) concerning the lovely fairy Manto, who every seventh day underwent transformation into a loathsome serpent. Macaulay drew from this a lesson about those statesmen who snatch Liberty away when she does not produce the results they want.
Sir Henry Craik had heard such glowing reports of Agra’s Taj Mahal, that he was afraid it might prove to be an anticlimax.
In 1907, Sir Henry Craik MP went on a tour of India. That December, he made his way south from New Delhi to Agra, where he marvelled at the sixteenth-century fort and the Pearl Mosque of Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58) before following the River Yamuna for a mile or so towards Shah Jahan’s legendary monument to his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Would it be all that report had made it?
After driving the man-eating ogre Grendel from Hrothgar’s hall, Beowulf must now deal with Grendel’s anguished and vengeful mother.
Beowulf has driven Grendel, the man-eating ogre, from Hrothgar’s hall and mortally wounded him. Thinking his mission complete, Beowulf took his leave of Hrothgar, only for the creature’s anguished mother to steal into the king’s hall and snatch his bosom friend in revenge. Now she has vanished beneath the waters of a mire, but Beowulf is not to be put off. Commending his soul to God, Beowulf leaps after her.
The terrible monster Grendel, secure in the knowledge that no blade can bite him, bursts into Hrothgar’s hall expecting another meal of man-flesh.
The lordly Hall of Hrothgar, King of the Danes, has been plagued night after night by a grotesque creature named Grendel. Offspring of Cain through many wretched fathers, he dwelt in swamps, feeding off the flesh of men, and feared neither sword nor spear. But tonight, Beowulf and his Swedish warrior-band have answered Hrothgar’s call for aid; and lying on soft pelts and rugs, they wait in uneasy slumber.
Henry VII made sure that he had eyes and ears wherever they were needed to put an end to thirty years of political conspiracy.
King Henry VII, so Sir Francis Bacon tells us, aspired to be held in awe by his subjects, rather than in love. To this end he employed spies not only in the courts of his European neighbours but also in England, and kept abreast of all that was going in his own court by compiling private notebooks in which the words and deeds of every courtier were carefully recorded.