Fiction
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Fiction’
Two British spies look out over war-torn Belgrade, and find the inspiration they need to go on with their dangerous mission.
In John Buchan’s Great War novel ‘Greenmantle’, published in 1916, Richard Hannay and Peter Pienaar are spying for the Allies, making their way under cover through occupied lands to Constantinople. At Belgrade, recently captured by Austria-Hungary, they look on the devastation of war and their hearts go out to the brave people of Serbia.
Rosalind explains to Orlando that Time moves at different paces depending on who you are.
William Shakespeare’s As You Like It is believed to be the play that opened the New Globe theatre in 1599. After Frederick usurped the throne of his brother Duke Senior (so the story goes) he exiled his own daughter Rosalind for disobedience. Disguised as a boy, Rosalind fled to the Forest of Arden only to run into a long-time admirer, Orlando. To hide her confusion, and still incognito, she accosts him ‘like a saucy lackey’.
William Shakespeare immortalised his lover in verse, as if holding back for ever the ravages of Time.
Without question, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 is one of the best known and most beloved poems in the English language. William immortalises his lover in verse, saying that though beauty must pass away all too soon, she and her loveliness will live on in his lines as long as there are men to read them.
When Raffles Haw comes to sleepy Tamfield, his breathtaking generosity starts turning heads at once, and one belongs to Laura McIntyre.
The first visit of the McIntyres’ new neighbour, free-spending, blue-sky-thinking Raffles Haw, has impressed Laura deeply. He has been upstairs to her brother’s studio and bought two paintings, and even offered to move an unsightly hill for her convenience. Laura’s fiancé Hector, away at sea, is quite forgotten.
From the very first lines, Jane Austen’s classic novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ pokes affectionate fun at Georgian England.
The opening lines of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1813) are arguably the best-loved in all English fiction. In the drawing-room of Longbourn, a gentleman’s residence near the Hertfordshire village of Meryton, pretty but empty-headed Mrs Bennet is all of a flutter because there is a new neighbour in Netherfield Park.
William Shakespeare recalls how the love of his life once teased him to the brink of despair.
This Sonnet is held to be one of William Shakespeare’s earlier works, owing in part to its relatively simple form. However, keen-eyed observers have noted that the husband of Anne Hathaway seems to have buried some tender-hearted little clues in the closing lines.