Friday, October 30, 2015

Are you a genius?

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‘Oh! Ezra! how beautiful you are! With your pale face and fair hair! I wonder - are you a genius? or are you only an artist in Life?’ This i...

A spirit to our honour

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‘The Year 1765 has been the most remarkable Year of my Life. That enormous Engine, fabricated by the British Parliament, for battering down ...
Thursday, October 29, 2015

The bishop in Buganda

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James Hannington, Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, was shot dead 130 years ago today, with his own rifle, executed - along with 50 or so...
Monday, October 19, 2015

Live ten times happier

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Jonathan Swift, that great Anglo-Irish satirist, man of pamphlets, died 270 years ago. His name is best remembered for Gulliver’s Travels , ...
Monday, October 12, 2015

Do what thou wilt

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‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law [. . .] I am aflame with the brandy of the thought that I am the sublimest Mystic in all hi...

Manliness of the soldier

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Today marks the bicentenary of the birth of William J. Hardee, one of the best of the Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War. He is ...

The brave Edith Cavell

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Edith Cavell, a British war and nursing heroine, second only perhaps to Florence Nightingale, was executed 100 years ago today. She revoluti...
Sunday, October 11, 2015

Burning at the heart

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François Mauriac, a French novelist and Nobel Prize winner barely read in the English world, was born 130 years ago today. As an old man eme...