A stunning novel based on the true story of the Great Plague that came to Eyam, England in 1665, and nearly destroyed the village. The disease arrives in a parcel of dress patterns, and within 14 months, destroys 267 of the village’s 350 inhabitants.
Historians estimate that this act of selflessness, by preventing the spread of plague, saved hundreds of thousands of lives throughout England. It also tells us that for the next year, people from the surrounding villages left food and supplies outside the town so that Eyam would not starve.
“She did not speak to these men of those times. She also did not tell them that her father had been in prison, arrested by the Taliban for being educated in England. ‘You can stay here with us in this village,’ one of the men said. ‘You can make your home here.’ ‘I have to find my family’.”
“My grandmother always dressed in white, summer and winter. She had come to Venice from England at twenty years old and instantly ‘fell like a ripe apple’ into the arms of a worker at the shipyard -he became my mother’s father.”
“A hidden side of eighteenth-century England: the world of infanticide and child slavery. Otis Gardiner, the Coram man, makes a vicious living disposing of the unwanted children and illegitimate offspring of distraught young women, rich and poor.
The Sterkarms have plundered the border between Scotland and England for generations. Suddenly intruders, calling themselves Elves, want the Sterkarms to stop their violent ways.
“An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is “just the same as” or “just as bad as” totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.”
“If Albert was right and they were only schoolgirls about the same age as his sisters in England, how was it they were allowed to set out alone, at the end of a summer afternoon? He reminded himself that he was in Australia now: Australia, where anything might happen. In England everything had been done before: quite often by one’s own ancestors, over and over again.”
In England, John Spencer’s parents are dead, and his uncle sends him off to the Royal Navy as a “Gentleman Volunteer” on a ship, the HMS Sentinel, on anti-slavery patrol.
“It was that which first made me understand the enormity of what had happened. Nuclear missiles had fallen on England, and if they’d fallen on England they must have fallen on a lot of other countries too. This rain, black rain, was falling now on each of them.”
“Colin always thought his little brother Luke was a pest--until Luke becomes so sick that the doctors say he may die. Colin is sent to England to stay with his aunt and uncle.”
“It’s a little story of a family that is set around the turn of the century. The father has to leave his job abruptly and decides to pursue a new career in America. The mother and four children are left in England, staying with two elderly aunts, while the father gets settled.”
“Nicholas is the son of a wool trader in the late 1400s in England. He is apprenticed to his father, and he notices that something is not right with visitors from Italy who sell his father’s wool overseas.”
“The story goes that King John intended to travel through the neighborhood. At that time in England, any road the king travelled on had to be made a public highway, but the people of Gotham did not want a public highway through their village.”
Mr. Tudor’s uncle had married an English lady who was third cousin to a living lord, and Amy regarded the whole family with great respect, for in spite of her American birth and breeding, she possessed that reverence for titles which haunts the best of us—that unacknowledged loyalty to the early faith in kings which set the most democratic nation under the sun in ferment at the coming of a royal yellow-haired laddie, some years ago, and which still has something to do with the love the young country bears the old, like that of a big son for an imperious little mother, who held him while she could, and let him go with a farewell scolding when he rebelled.