Lloyd Williams found a boxing club in Berlin

Lloyd Williams found a boxing club in Berlin where he could do an hour's training for a few pennies. It was in a working class district called Wedding, north of the city center. He exercised with the Indian clubs and the medicine ball, skipped rope, hit the punch bag, and then put on a helmet and did five rounds in the ring. The club coach found him a sparring partner, a German his own age and size – Lloyd was a welterweight. The German boy had a nice fast jab that came from nowhere and hurt Lloyd several times, until Lloyd hit him with a left hook and knocked him down.

Lloyd had been raised in a rough neighborhood, the East End of London. At the age of twelve he had been bullied at school. 'Same thing happened to me,' his stepfather, Bernie Leckwith , had said. 'Cleverest boy in school, and you get picked on by the class shlamer.' Dad was Jewish – his mother had spoken only Yiddish. He had taken Lloyd to the Aldgate Boxing Club. Ethel had been against it, but Bernie had overruled her, something that did no t happen often.

Lloyd had learned to move fast and punch hard, and the bullying had stopped. He had also got the broken nose that made him look less of a pretty boy. And he had discovered a talent. He had quick reflexes and a combative streak, and he had won prizes in the ring. The coach was disappointed that he wanted to go to Cambridge University instead of turning professional.

He showered and put his suit back on, then went to a workingmen bar, bought a glass of draft beer, and sat down to write to his half-sister, Millie, about the incident with the Brownshirts. Millie was envious of him taking this trip with their mother, and he had promised to send her frequent bulletins.

Lloyd had been shaken by this morning 's fracas. Politics was part of everyday life for him: his mother had been a Member of Parliament, his father was local councilor in London, and he himself was London Chairman of the Labour League of Youth. But it had always been a matter of debating and voting – until today. He had never before seen an office thrashed by uniformed thugs while the police looked on smiling. It was the politics with the gloves off, and it had shocked him.

'Could this happen in London ? He wrote. His first instinct was to think that it could not. But Hitler had admirers among British industrialists and newspapers proprietors. Only a few months ago the rogue MP Sir Osvald Mosley had started the British Union of Fascists. Like the Nazis, they had to strut up and down in military-style uniforms. What next?

He finished his letter and folded it, then caught the S-train back into the city center. He and his mother were going to meet Walter and Maud von Ulrich for dinner. Lloyd had been hearing about Maud all his life. She and his mother were unlikely friends. Ethel had started her working life as a maid in a grand house owned by Maud's family. Later they had been suffragettes together, campaigning for votes for women. During the war they had produced a feminist newspaper. The sodier's wife. Then they had quarreled over political tactics and become estranged.

Pg 23 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

Eleanora Cohen

Eleanora Cohen came into this world on a Thursday, late in the summer of 1877. Those who rose early that morning would recall noticing a flock of purple-and-white hoopoes circling above the harbor, looping and darting about as if in an attempt to mend a tear in the firmament. Whether or nor they were successful, the bird eventually slowed their swoop and settled in around the city, on the steps of the courthouse, the red tile roof of the Constanta Hotel, and the bell tower atop St Basil's Academy. They roosted in the lantern room of the lighthouse, the octagonal stone minaret of the mosque, and the forward deck of a steamer coughing puffs of smoke into an otherwise clear horizon. Hoopoes coated the town like frosting, piped in along the rain gutters of the governor's mansion and slathered on the gilt dome of the Orthodox church. In the trees around Yakob and Leah Cohen's house the flock seemed especially excited, chattering, flapping their wings, and hopping from branch to branch like a crowd of peasants lining the streets of the capital for an imperial parade. The hoopoes would probably have been regarded as an auspicious sign, were it not for the unfortunate events that coincided with Eleanora' birth.

Early this morning, the Third Division of Tsar Alexander II's Royal Cavalry rode in from the north and assembled on a hilltop overlooking the town.

Laid out bellow them like a feast, Constanta had been left almost entirely without defenses

From the book “The Oracle of Stambul” by Michael David Lukas

Do you think journalists should write respectfully about politicians?

Ritter drove on, following the south bank of the Landwehr Canal. Carla looked at the barges, their loads of coal topped with snow like mountains. She felt a sense of disappointment. She had contrived to spend longer with Werner, by hinting that she wanted a lift, then she had wasted the time talking about ice hockey.

What would she have liked to have talked to him about? She did not know.

Herr Franck said to Mother: 'I read your column in The Democrat'.

'I hope you enjoyed it'

'I was sorry to see you writing disrespectfully about our chancellor.'

'Do you think journalists should write respectfully about politicians? Mother replied cheerfully. 'That's radical. The Nazi press would have to be polite about my husband! They wouldn't like that.'

'Not all the politicians, obviously.' Franck said irritably.

They crossed the teeming junction pf Postdammer Platz. Cars and trams vied with horse-drawn carts and pedestrians in a chaotic melee.

 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

The meadow was flooded with spring light and dotted with flower-seas

The meadow was flooded with spring light and dotted with flower-seas Alexander ran across it.

Half naked and barefoot, he moved quickly against the wind that blew through his hair and brought with it a slight smell of sea pray.

Peritas was running alongside, checking his pace so as not to overtake his master and lose him. Now and again he barked to attract Alexander's attention and the Prince turned towards the dog and smiled , but without stopping.

It was one of those moments in which Alexander gave free rein to his spirit, in which he flew like a bird, galloped like a steed. It was then that his ambiguous and mysterious centaur- like nature – violent and sensitive, dark and sunny at one at the same time – seemed to find expression in harmonious movement, in a sort of initiatory dance under the shinning light of the sun or in the sudden shade of a cloud.

With which each stride his sculptured body first contracted and then extended in a long movement, his golden hair bounced soft and bright on his back like a mane, and his graceful arms accompanied the rise and fall of his chest in the brisk labour of his running.

Philip watched him in silence, sitting immobile on horseback at the edge of the wood. Then when he realized they were close now and heard the dog's barking suddenly on spotting him, he spurred on his steed and came alongside his son, waving his hand, smiling even, but without stopping him, enchanted as he was by the power of that running and the wonder of those indefatigable limbs.

Alexander stopped on the bank of a small river and dived into the water. Philip dismounted and waited for him. The boy leaped out of the stream together with the dog and they both shook the water from their bodies. Philip embraced his son hard and left Alexander's equally strong grip – tangible proof that his child had become a man.

'I have come to collect you,' he said. 'We're going home.'

Alexander looked at him in disbelief. 'Is that the King's word?'

'The king's word,' assured Philip. 'But the day will come when you will remember this period of your life with regret for its ever having come to and end. I never had such fortune; I had no songs, nor poetry, nor wise lecturers. And this is why I am so tired, son, for this is why my years weigh so heavily on me.'

Alexander said nothing and they walked together through the meadow, towards the house: the young man followed by his dog, the father holding his horse by its bridle.

Suddenly, from behind a hill that hid the view of the Mieza, there came the sound of a horse neighing. It was an acute, penetrating sound, a powerful call like that of a wild beast, or a chemical creature. And then there come the sound of men shouting, calling and powerful hooves all shod with bronze that made the earth tremble.

The neighing came again, more acute and angrier this time. Philip turned towards his son and said, ' I have brought you a present.'

They reached the top of the hill and Alexander stopped in amazement: below, there before him, a black stallion reared up onto his hind legs, shining with sweat like a bronze statue under the rain, held by five men with ropes and bridles in their hands, all trying to keep the animal's formidable power under control.

From the book: Alexander: Child of A Dream. By Valerio Massino Manfredi. Translated by Iain Halliday

There were a dozen piles of the heavy metal bars

There were a dozen piles of the heavy metal bars. They had been stacked too high, or perhaps there was an irregularity in one of the rows, Rob was enjoying the glean of the sun on the wet metal when the driver of a dray, with loud commands and a cracking of his whip and tugging on his reins, backed his dirty horses too far and too fast, so that the rear of the heavy wagon hit the pile with a thud.

Rob long had vowed that his boys would not play on the docks. He hated drays. Never did he see one but that he thought of his brother Samuel being crashed to death under the wheels of a freight wagon. Now he watched in horror as another accident occurred.

The iron bar at the top was jarred forward, so that it teetered at the edge and the began to slide over the lip of a pile, followed by two more.

There was a shouted cry of warning and a desperate human scattering, but two of the slaves had others in front of them. They fell as they scrabbled, so that the full weight of one of the pigs of iron came down on one of them, crushing life from him in an instant.

One end of another pig slammed down on the other man's lower right leg, and his screaming incited rob to action.

'Here, get it off them. Quickly and carefully, now! He said and half a dozen slaves lifted the iron bars from the two men.

He had them moved well away from the pile of iron. A single glance was all that was necessary to ascertain that the man who had taken the full brunt was dead. His chest was crushed and he had been throttled by a broken windpipe, so his face already was dark and engorged.

The other slave no longer was screaming, having fainted when he was moved. It was just as well; his foot and ankle were fearsomely mangled and Rob could do nothing to restore them. He dispatched a slave to his house to fetch his surgical kit from Mary, and while the wounded man was unconscious he incised the healthy skin above the injury and began to flay it back to make a flap, and then to slice through meat and muscle.

Form the man arose a personal stink that made Rob nervous and afraid, the stench of a human animal who had sweated in toil again and again until his unwashed rags had absorbed his rotten smell and compounded it and made it almost a tangible part of him like his shaven slave's head or the foot Rob was in the process of removing. It caused Rob to remember the two similarity stinking stevedore slaves who had carried Dad home from his job on the docks, home to die

From the book “The physician” by Noah Gordon.

These were Rob J's last safe and secure moments of blessed innocence,

These were Rob J's last safe and secure moments of blessed innocence, but in his ignorance he considered it hardship to be forced to remain near his father's house with his brothers and his sister. This early in the spring, the sun rode low enough to send warm licks under the eaves of the thatched roof , and he sprawled on the rough stone stoop outside the front door, enjoying the cosiness. A woman was picking her way over the broken surface of Carpenter's Street. The street needed repair, as did most of the small frame working men houses thrown up carelessly by skilled artisans who earned their living erecting solid homes for those richer and more fortunate.

He was shelling a basket of early peas and trying to keep his eyes on the younger children, his responsibility when Mum was away. William Stewart, six, and Anne Mary, four, were grubbing in the dirt at the side of the house and playing secret giggly games. Jonathan Carter, eighteen months old, lay on a lambskin, papped, burped and gurgling with content. Samuel Edward, who was seven, had given Rob J. The slip. Somehow crafty Samuel always managed to melt away instead of sharing work, and Rob was keeping an eye out for him, feeling wrathful. He split the green pods one after another and scraped the peas from the waxy seed-case with his thumb the way Mum did, not pausing as he noted the woman coming directly to him.

Stays in her stained bodice raised her bosom so that sometimes when she moved there was a glimpse of rouged nipple and her fleshy face was garish with cosmetics. Rob J. Was only nine years old, but a child of London knew a trollop.

'Here now. This Nathanael Cole's house?

He studied her resentfully, for it wasn't the first time tarts had come to their door seeking for his father. 'Who wants to learn?' he said roughly, glad his Da was out seeking work and she had missed him, glad his Mam was out delivering embroidery and was spared embarrassment-

'His wife needs him. She sent me.'

'What do you mean, needs him?' The competent young hands stopped shelling peas.

The whore regarded him coolly, having caught his opinion of her in his tone and manner. 'She's your mother?'

He nodded.

'She's taken labor bad. She's in Egglestan's stables close by Puddle Dock. You'd best find your father and tell him,' the woman said, and then went away.

The boy looked around desperately- 'Samuel' he shouted, but bloody Samuel was off who-knows-where, as usual, and Rob fetched William and Anne Mary from their play. 'Take care of the small ones, Willum,' he said. Then he left the house and started to run.

From the book “The physician” by Noah Gordon.