Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
The ancient Greek King knew victory had cost his army more than it could afford to lose.
In 279 BC, forty-two years after his illustrious predecessor Alexander the Great died, Pyrrhus, King of Epirus and Macedonia, halted the advance of the Roman Republic at Asculum (Ascoli Satriano) in Apulia, southern Italy. The cost to his army was so great that he famously declared that another such victory would utterly ruin him - a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ indeed.
Cicero warns those who seek power through civic unrest that they will never be the beneficiaries of it.
In 63 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) accused Lucius Sergius Catilina of scheming to overthrow the Republic. In exposing the plot, he warned the Senate against five kinds of political troublemaker, including those who stir up ill-feeling and violence at home, hoping to be the beneficiaries of it.
Sir Mulberry Hawk’s coarse conduct towards Kate Nickleby has awoken a spark of decency in Lord Frederick Verisopht.
Sir Mulberry Hawk has preyed upon the weak character of Lord Frederick Verisopht for years, but the young nobleman has finally stood up to his ‘friend’ over Hawk’s ungentlemanly conduct towards pretty Kate Nickleby. The breach is irreparable, and has come at last to a duel.
The future hero of Waterloo dealt with political ambush as comfortably as he dealt with the military kind.
Arthur Wellesley spent the years 1797 to 1804 in India. He went out as a Colonel in the British Army’s 33rd regiment of Foot, and was soon being addressed as General Sir Arthur. On 23rd September 1803, he secured a significant victory over the Maratha Empire at Assaye in the state of Maharashtra, western India.
A young man from the Italian city on the Adige River demonstrates that class has nothing to do with wealth.
Samuel Smiles’s ‘Self-Help’ enthusiastically encouraged working men to take advantage of Britain’s entrepreneurial economy. Yet he never once promised riches; he promised dignity and self-respect, and told this tale to illustrate their superiority.
English lawyer Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in place of a French aristocrat.
At the height (or depth) of the French Revolution, Sydney Carton has exchanged places and names with aristocrat Charles Darnay, winning just enough time for Darnay and his family to be smuggled to safety in England. As Carton is led to the guillotine, a seamstress condemned to the same fate shares a confidence with him.