Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Herbert Bury believed that it was the British way to profit with another country, not to profit from it.
In 1912, the Lena massacre in Russia saw 250 gold miners shot during protests over low wages and harsh conditions in a mine backed by British money. Investors were ashamed when they learnt of the systematic exploitation, and Herbert Bury assured Tsar Nicholas II that decent Englishmen wanted Russia’s people to prosper.
When Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, became the Tower of London’s first prisoner he did not intend making a long stay.
Ranulf Flambard followed William the Conqueror over to England, helped compile the Domesday Book, and collected eye-watering taxes for William II ‘Rufus’. On his accession in 1100, Henry I won many friends by making the abrasive and ambitious cleric, now Bishop of Durham, the Tower of London’s first prisoner.
Alexander Graham Bell was heading for a dead end when a broken component showed him the way.
In 1875, Alexander Graham Bell, a Scotsman working with deaf children in Boston, MA, had rigged up a complex apparatus to transmit sound by electric current. As his assistant Thomas Watson recalled, all was disappointment until one day a tiny contact jammed.
Dr Johnson’s cat left James Boswell cold, but the great man himself would do anything to avoid hurting the little fellow’s feelings.
Dr Samuel Johnson has a reputation today as a master of put-downs and unkind cracks, but his private prayers and various passages from James Boswell’s biography show another, much gentler side. Here, we meet Hodge, the distinguished lexicographer’s cat in the 1760s.
A doctor is wondering how to apologise for being drunk on the job, when he receives a letter from his patient.
George Fordyce (1736-1802), an eminent Scottish physician on the staff at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, did not often make house calls — not, at any rate, twice at the same address. But Samuel Rogers, a friend of Byron, recalled one occasion when luck was very much on his side.
Legend tells how Richard the Lionheart’s favourite singer found where Leopold of Austria had stowed him.
In December 1192, Richard I was arrested in Vienna and imprisoned at Dürnstein in lower Austria near the Danube, on the orders of his former ally in the Third Crusade, Leopold of Austria. According to legend, his place of captivity was a closely guarded secret but one man was determined to uncover it.