Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
A persistent dream prompts a Norfolk tradesman to walk all the way to London in the hope of bettering his lot.
The following English folktale is an adaptation of an ancient legend found in ‘The Thousand and One Nights’, and told and retold of places from Cairo to Dundonald Castle in Scotland. This version places it in Swaffham in Norfolk, and is told by antiquarian Abraham de la Pryme.
Sir Hubert Parry explained to students at the Royal College of Music that some mistakes are creative whereas others are destructive.
Addressing students at the Royal College of Music in January 1918, Sir Hubert Parry distinguished two kinds of mistake, the mistakes we make when we seize our responsibilities as free men and women a little clumsily, and the mistakes we make when we lazily follow whatever the fashionable thinking may be.
Richard Cobden despaired at British statesmen using the peerless Royal Navy merely to strangle trade in other countries.
The Victorian era saw Britain abandon its colonial ‘single market’ in favour of much greater free trade, but Richard Cobden was not yet satisfied. He urged Parliament to stop using the navy to blockade the ports of its commercial and political rivals – in modern terms, to stop imposing sanctions and punitive tariffs.
A cat belonging to a Carthusian monastery in Paris gets a free lunch, but who is exploiting whom?
In his little book about cats, Victorian cartoonist Charles Ross describes the criminal career of a cat attached to a Carthusian monastery in Paris. His story confirms that cats are adept at all kind of thievery and opportunism, but also reminds us that they are not the only ones.
Young inventor James Watt’s life in London was overshadowed by the perpetual fear of being snatched.
In 1756, James Watt was not yet the creator of the first commercial steam engine, but a lowly maker of scientific instruments in London. The Seven Years’ War was just getting under way, and Watt was so afraid of being scooped up for service at sea or in some colonial plantation that he dared not go out of his door.
Michael Faraday’s tour of Europe included a ‘picturesque’ multicultural event on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.
In November 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte, smarting from his humiliating Retreat from Moscow, was waging war across Europe. This did not stop Sir Humphry Davy (who called him ‘the Corsican robber’) going to Paris to receive the Napoleon Prize, or young Michael Faraday from going with him, and afterwards they went on to the Kingdom of Naples, then under French control.