Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Abdullah Abdul Kadir gives us his first-hand impressions of the Founder of Singapore and of his first wife, Olivia.
In 1808, young colonial secretary Stamford Raffles went down the Malaysian coast from Penang to the formerly Dutch colony of Malacca as a rest cure. There, Raffles and his wife Olivia made the acquaintance of Abdullah Abdul Kadir, a local teacher of Malay, who left us his pen-portrait of them.
The busy trading hub of Malacca was to be consigned to history, until Stamford Raffles saw that history was one of its assets.
Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is known today as the founder of Singapore, but his first foray into statecraft came when he was still in his late twenties. In 1808, as assistant secretary to the Governor of Penang he penned an impassioned report which saved Malacca, modern-day Melaka in Malaysia, from oblivion.
An aristocratic widow advertises for a husband, and among the line-up of natty and noble suitors is a rough-and-ready Olaf Tryggvason.
In 984, exiled Norwegian prince Olaf Tryggvason lost his wife Geira, and went on a four-year grief-stricken rampage through Britain, before suddenly becoming a Christian in the Isles of Scilly. Hearing that Gyda, the King of Dublin’s sister, had summoned a Thing (a Viking council) to choose a husband, Olaf returned to England.
The Rivers Son and Narmada rise together in the hills of Amarkantak, but because of Johilla they never meet again.
William Sleeman, after whom the little village of Sleemanabad in Madhya Pradesh is named, retold a classic Indian fable in an open letter to his sister. It is a love story of three rivers, the Narmada (Nerbudda), the Son and the Johila, and explains why the Narmada and the Son rise in the same place in central India, but flow in opposite directions.
Alice was given a choice between her carriage and lady’s maid on the one hand, and Richard Grey on the other.
Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey tells the tale of a young woman forced to earn a meagre and humiliating living as a governess. The shock of employment and the utterly alien lives of her employers is hard to bear, but no daughter of Richard and Alice Grey was afraid of a little self-sacrifice.
Herbert Bury distinguished two kinds of overseas investment, and only one was worthy of Englishmen.
Herbert Bury, whose duties as an assistant bishop to the Bishop of London took him all over Europe, came to believe that Britain’s place in the world depended not on bending other countries to our will or draining their resources, but on helping them to grow.