conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled British History For Dummies about Treason, Discover, Britain with the genre: History, Europe.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Treason, plague, two world wars and that's just forstarters. Discover the fascinating history of Britain
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Bestseller, British with the genre: History, Europe?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'British History for Dummies'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.. End with the sentence ' Then he got recalled to Rome.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: British History for Dummies
  All hell broke loose after the attack on Boudica. The Iceni went on the rampage, attacking anything Roman they could find. Even more worrying for the Romans, their old allies the Trinovantes joined the Iceni. The Roman legions went to pieces. The Ninth Legion got pushed back, the commander of the Second Legion refused to move. Everyone else was with Suetonius Paulinus in Wales killing Druids. Boudica led her tribe to Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), the great town the Romans had built up as their capital with an enormous temple dedicated to the Emperor Claudius (they'd made him a god for conquering Britain). All the Romans fled to the temple because it had a big walled compound, but it wasn't enough to keep Boudica's people out. They broke in, burned the temple to the ground, and killed everyone they could find. Then they headed for London.
  London wasn't the capital, but it was an up-and-coming port, and a lot of Romans and Romanised Britons lived there. Suetonius Paulinus couldn't get troops to London in time, so he gave the order for everyone to get out. Boudica burned London to the ground. Then she headed to Verulamium, modern St Albans, and destroyed that.
  No Roman emperor could allow a whole province to fall out of control like that. Suetonius Paulinus raced back from Wales and lured Boudica into open battle near Mancetter, in the West Midlands. The Romans won – well, they were bound to – but they didn't catch Boudica. According to legend, which may well be true, she and her daughters poisoned themselves. And according to the popular version, Boudica is buried underneath one of the platforms at King's Cross Station.
  The Romans in Scotland? You're probably thinking the Romans didn't conquer Scotland. Think again. The Roman governor Agricola led an army through the Lowlands and on into the Highlands. Agricola conquered the Lowlands without too much trouble. Some tribes made peace quickly, and he soon dealt with the ones that didn't. The whole area became a Roman province, with a big Roman camp called Trimontium at modern-day Newstead. Agricola carried on building forts as he moved north to take on the Caledonians of the Highlands. An almighty battle occurred between the Romans and the Caledonians at Mons Graupius in AD 84, and the Caledonians lost. Heavily. But to Agricola's surprise, the Caledonians didn't come and surrender. They burned everything and took to the hills. Agricola knew he couldn't follow them, so he and his men turned back.
  Still, most of Caledonia was in Roman hands, which meant the Romans had conquered modern-day England, Wales, and most of Scotland. A few years ago, archaeologists even found the remains of what looked at first like a Roman fort in Ireland, but we now think the spot's more likely to have been a trading post. At any rate, Agricola could feel pretty pleased with himself: Britannia was firmly in Roman hands. Then he got recalled to Rome.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Titus Oates was a clergyman and professional liar who in 1678 claimed that a huge Popish (Catholic) Plot existed to kill the king. There wasn't, but the claim provoked a huge panic, and Catholics found themselves under arrest. The Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett, was among twenty-four Catholics who were actually put to death; many others died in prison. Parliament even tried to get Charles's Catholic brother James excluded from the succession to the throne. When the truth came out – no such Popish Plot existed – Charles pounced. He dissolved Parliament and ruled without it, living off money from his good friend Louis XIV. When some old Cromwellians really did hatch the Rye House Plot to kill Charles, he had them arrested and executed. He was still firmly in control when he died in 1685.
  The occasional outbreak of plague was an occupational hazard in the seventeenth century, but the outbreak that hit London in 1665 was special: Nothing like it had been seen since the Black Death. Thousands died, and infected houses had to be sealed up with the people inside them. No one had a cure because no one really knew what caused it. The next year, the city burnt to the ground in a terrible fire that started with an overheated baker's oven. Charles II himself had to take command, ordering houses to be blown up to deny the fire the chance to spread. By the end the city was a smoking ruin, including the great Cathedral of St Paul. The fire gave the chance for a complete rebuilding programme, of course, which is where Sir Christopher Wren came in with his famous designs, but at the time, it seemed like yet another blow from an angry God on a country that had suffered enough.
  When you look at the Tudor and Stuart times they look, well, historical – all those ruffs, doublets, gadzooks, and what have you. So learning that historians see this period as the start of the Modern period comes as a surprise. These people may look old-fashioned, but some of the things they were thinking and doing were surprisingly close to our own way of thinking. Starting off with the English Renaissance in the sixteenth century, by the time Charles II came home (1660) Britons were well into the Scientific Revolution, with the Enlightenment just round the corner. Modern government? Thank the Tudors. Modern art and music? Start with the Renaissance. Theatre as we know it? They knew it, too. Modern science and medicine? Look no further. Democratic government and communal living? The Stuarts knew all about it. This chapter explains the ideas that started the modern world and made us the people we are.
  Then something strange began to happen in Italy around the end of the fourteenth century. Scholars started looking in cupboards and attics and finding lots of ancient Latin and Greek manuscripts they hadn't known about. They found Hebrew manuscripts, too. In this newly discovered treasure trove were works of philosophy and theology, including the works of Plato whom no one had really read before. So scholars started learning Greek and Hebrew (they'd been using Latin translations) and found, for example, that Plato had some very different things to say from Aristotle, and that some of the Church's important Latin documents were actually forgeries. Suddenly unearthing ancient classical writings was the thing to get into. People called the study of the ideas found in these new texts humanism because they reckoned they were getting a clearer understanding of what being human actually meant; later on, historians called the studies of this period a rebirth of the Classical world, or in French, the Renaissance.
  Henry was a real Renaissance prince: One moment he'd be discussing theology or philosophy, the next he'd be jousting or wrestling with the King of France (though not usually at the same time). He had palaces at Greenwich and Richmond, and later on, he got Cardinal Wolsey's palace at Hampton Court (see Chapter 11 for more about Henry and Wolsey) but Nonsuch was the great palace Henry built to wow the world. We don't know exactly what Nonsuch looked like – nothing is left of it except the foundations, and the only drawings we have show the outside – but by all accounts, visiting it was a breathtaking experience. Henry thought big and brash, and historians reckon that all those nice red brick Tudor buildings with their wooden beams were originally hideously garish, with lots of bright colours and gold paint. (Discovering what ghastly taste people in history could have is always a shock.) We can get some idea of what Nonsuch may have been like by looking at Hampton Court, but Nonsuch was a very different sort of place, so we have to rely heavily on the famous paintings of Hans Holbein.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Titus Oates was a clergyman and professional liar who in 1678 claimed that a huge Popish (Catholic) Plot existed to kill the king. There wasn't, but the claim provoked a huge panic, and Catholics found themselves under arrest. The Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett, was among twenty-four Catholics who were actually put to death; many others died in prison. Parliament even tried to get Charles's Catholic brother James excluded from the succession to the throne. When the truth came out – no such Popish Plot existed – Charles pounced. He dissolved Parliament and ruled without it, living off money from his good friend Louis XIV. When some old Cromwellians really did hatch the Rye House Plot to kill Charles, he had them arrested and executed. He was still firmly in control when he died in 1685.
  The occasional outbreak of plague was an occupational hazard in the seventeenth century, but the outbreak that hit London in 1665 was special: Nothing like it had been seen since the Black Death. Thousands died, and infected houses had to be sealed up with the people inside them. No one had a cure because no one really knew what caused it. The next year, the city burnt to the ground in a terrible fire that started with an overheated baker's oven. Charles II himself had to take command, ordering houses to be blown up to deny the fire the chance to spread. By the end the city was a smoking ruin, including the great Cathedral of St Paul. The fire gave the chance for a complete rebuilding programme, of course, which is where Sir Christopher Wren came in with his famous designs, but at the time, it seemed like yet another blow from an angry God on a country that had suffered enough.
  When you look at the Tudor and Stuart times they look, well, historical – all those ruffs, doublets, gadzooks, and what have you. So learning that historians see this period as the start of the Modern period comes as a surprise. These people may look old-fashioned, but some of the things they were thinking and doing were surprisingly close to our own way of thinking. Starting off with the English Renaissance in the sixteenth century, by the time Charles II came home (1660) Britons were well into the Scientific Revolution, with the Enlightenment just round the corner. Modern government? Thank the Tudors. Modern art and music? Start with the Renaissance. Theatre as we know it? They knew it, too. Modern science and medicine? Look no further. Democratic government and communal living? The Stuarts knew all about it. This chapter explains the ideas that started the modern world and made us the people we are.
  Then something strange began to happen in Italy around the end of the fourteenth century. Scholars started looking in cupboards and attics and finding lots of ancient Latin and Greek manuscripts they hadn't known about. They found Hebrew manuscripts, too. In this newly discovered treasure trove were works of philosophy and theology, including the works of Plato whom no one had really read before. So scholars started learning Greek and Hebrew (they'd been using Latin translations) and found, for example, that Plato had some very different things to say from Aristotle, and that some of the Church's important Latin documents were actually forgeries. Suddenly unearthing ancient classical writings was the thing to get into. People called the study of the ideas found in these new texts humanism because they reckoned they were getting a clearer understanding of what being human actually meant; later on, historians called the studies of this period a rebirth of the Classical world, or in French, the Renaissance.
  Henry was a real Renaissance prince: One moment he'd be discussing theology or philosophy, the next he'd be jousting or wrestling with the King of France (though not usually at the same time). He had palaces at Greenwich and Richmond, and later on, he got Cardinal Wolsey's palace at Hampton Court (see Chapter 11 for more about Henry and Wolsey) but Nonsuch was the great palace Henry built to wow the world. We don't know exactly what Nonsuch looked like – nothing is left of it except the foundations, and the only drawings we have show the outside – but by all accounts, visiting it was a breathtaking experience. Henry thought big and brash, and historians reckon that all those nice red brick Tudor buildings with their wooden beams were originally hideously garish, with lots of bright colours and gold paint. (Discovering what ghastly taste people in history could have is always a shock.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. End with the sentence ' A truly Great Briton.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In 1865 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became Britain's first woman doctor, but anyone who thought that women in the medical profession was all plain sailing from now on was in for a rude shock. Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912) was a well-educated middle-class lady who, in 1868, decided to train as a doctor. She enrolled at Edinburgh University, or at least she tried to. But Edinburgh put every obstacle it could think of in her way. When they couldn't stop her and her companions enrolling, the university tried to stop them from taking their examinations or from getting their degrees. The students heckled her and tried to force her out of the lecture theatres. Jex-Blake had to spend almost as much time fighting legal battles with the university as studying medicine. But she didn't give in. Gradually people began to read about what was happening in Edinburgh. Parliament passed a law allowing women to enrol on medical courses on the same terms as men. Jex-Blake became a successful doctor, and helped found the London Medical School for Women. Not surprisingly, she was an active supporter of Votes for Women, too. Her case ought to be better known, if only because the opposition she faced was so incredibly fierce and just plain nasty. Not one of Edinburgh's finest hours.
  At the end of the Boer War, British General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener had the job of mopping up the Boer guerrilla fighters in the South African veldt. So he burned all crops for miles around, rounded the people up and forced them into a series of concentration camps. Yes, you did read that right. Soon thousands of men, women, and especially children were dying from malnutrition and disease. Which was not surprising, since the camps had almost no food, hardly any medical facilities, and no proper shelter.
  Emily Hobhouse (1860–1926) travelled out to South Africa specifically to see these camps for herself. One tough lady, she visited the camps and told the camp commandants exactly what she thought of them. By sheer determination and persistence, she got them to make at least some small improvements – you know, like recognising soap as an essential. Then she went back to Britain to take the issue up with the prime minister. Emily Hobhouse is one of those people who won't just sit and shake their heads at suffering but get up and do something about it. When Bob Geldof saw the news about famine in Ethiopia he got on the phone to create Band Aid; when Emily Hobhouse heard the news from South Africa, she got on a boat to create merry hell.
  For every famous figure like Alexander Fleming, the scientist who discovered penicillin, hundreds of Cecil Paines are in the background, and the Flemings wouldn't exist without them. Cecil Paine (1905–94) was a consultant pathologist in Sheffield in the 1930s. He was working on infections, particularly a terrible infection, called puerperal fever, which was still killing thousands of mothers in childbirth. No one knew what caused puerperal fever, and the number of mothers dying from it was going up instead of down. Paine worked out that wearing a mask during the delivery helped reduce the risk, and he came so close to working out how to use penicillin to eradicate it altogether.
  But Varah learned another lesson in that girl's death. She didn't die because her periods had started; she died because, when she most needed help, she felt totally alone, with no one to turn to. Varah decided that no one should ever feel that alone again, and in 1953 he started the telephone helpline that became the Samaritans. In 1953 many families didn't have a telephone, and no one had ever thought of using telephones in that way: Varah's idea – that whoever you were, whatever the problem, if you needed help someone would always be at the end of a phone ready to listen and support, 24/7 – was genuinely visionary thinking. Not many people bring off miracles, but creating the Samaritans seems to me to make Chad Varah one of them. A truly Great Briton.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first two paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: British History for Dummies
  All hell broke loose after the attack on Boudica. The Iceni went on the rampage, attacking anything Roman they could find. Even more worrying for the Romans, their old allies the Trinovantes joined the Iceni. The Roman legions went to pieces. The Ninth Legion got pushed back, the commander of the Second Legion refused to move. Everyone else was with Suetonius Paulinus in Wales killing Druids. Boudica led her tribe to Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), the great town the Romans had built up as their capital with an enormous temple dedicated to the Emperor Claudius (they'd made him a god for conquering Britain). All the Romans fled to the temple because it had a big walled compound, but it wasn't enough to keep Boudica's people out. They broke in, burned the temple to the ground, and killed everyone they could find. Then they headed for London.
  London wasn't the capital, but it was an up-and-coming port, and a lot of Romans and Romanised Britons lived there. Suetonius Paulinus couldn't get troops to London in time, so he gave the order for everyone to get out. Boudica burned London to the ground. Then she headed to Verulamium, modern St Albans, and destroyed that.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Now, nothing either Bacon or Galileo said suggested that God didn't exist, but a French thinker, René Descartes, seemed in some doubt. Descartes said that what you need to make sense of life, the universe, and everything else isn't faith, but reason. After all, for all we know, the whole world could be a trick created by the devil. The only thing we can be completely sure of is that we exist, and we only know that because we can think – 'I think, therefore I am,' as he famously put it.
  So if (a) we exist and (b) we know we exist, these things might indicate that there is a God who created us in the first place. But the point is, we can deduce there is a God instead of just believing it because the Church says so.
  But what sort of God is he, and what does he want? Charles I said the answer was quite simple: God wanted everyone to obey the king. Others said on the contrary, God wanted them to get rid of the king. Cromwell thought massacring the Irish and imprisoning Quakers was God's will. The Quakers thought God wanted them to stay silent in church; others thought God wanted them to walk around shouting about him at the top of their voices. You can see why John Milton, who was a Puritan and a big Cromwell supporter, felt moved to write a long epic poem, Paradise Lost, to try to impose a bit of order on things and explain how God operated.
  If you think Hobbes was being a tad pessimistic you may prefer to hear what John Locke had to say. Locke had fought in the Civil War and he witnessed all the debates that followed about who should have power and what to do with a bad king, and so on. He did some deep thinking, and he had some very important things to say:
  Locke's democratic ideas had a big influence in America and would help cause the American Revolution in due course. By contrast, Cromwell's one-man rule as Lord Protector (see Chapter 13 to see what this was all about) was a big disappointment to Locke. The Levellers were the ones who really lived out Locke's ideas (refer to Chapter 13 to find out what Cromwell did to them), and even more so Gerard Winstanley's little commune of Diggers on St George's Hill in Surrey, the first (and last) time anyone has ever managed to set up a communist cell in the Home Counties.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'In 1865 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became Britain's first woman doctor, but anyone who thought that women in the medical profession was all plain sailing from now on was in for a rude shock'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In 1865 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became Britain's first woman doctor, but anyone who thought that women in the medical profession was all plain sailing from now on was in for a rude shock. Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912) was a well-educated middle-class lady who, in 1868, decided to train as a doctor. She enrolled at Edinburgh University, or at least she tried to. But Edinburgh put every obstacle it could think of in her way. When they couldn't stop her and her companions enrolling, the university tried to stop them from taking their examinations or from getting their degrees. The students heckled her and tried to force her out of the lecture theatres. Jex-Blake had to spend almost as much time fighting legal battles with the university as she did studying medicine. But she didn't give in. Gradually people began to read about what was happening in Edinburgh. Parliament passed a law allowing women to enrol on medical courses on the same terms as men. Jex-Blake became a successful doctor, and helped found the London Medical School for Women. Not surprisingly, she was an active supporter of Votes for Women, too. Her case ought to be better known, if only because the opposition she faced was so incredibly fierce and just plain nasty. Not one of Edinburgh's finest hours.
  At the end of the Boer War, British General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener had the job of mopping up the Boer guerrilla fighters in the South African veldt. So he burned all crops for miles around, rounded the people up and forced them into a series of concentration camps. Yes, you did read that right. Soon thousands of men, women, and especially children were dying from malnutrition and disease. Which was not surprising, since the camps had almost no food, hardly any medical facilities, and no proper shelter.
  Emily Hobhouse (1860–1926) travelled out to South Africa specifically to see these camps for herself. One tough lady, she visited the camps and told the camp commandants exactly what she thought of them. By sheer determination and persistence, she got them to make at least some small improvements – you know, like recognising soap as an essential. Then she went back to Britain to take the issue up with the prime minister. Emily Hobhouse is one of those people who won't just sit and shake their heads at suffering but get up and do something about it. When Bob Geldof saw the news about famine in Ethiopia he got on the phone to create Band Aid; when Emily Hobhouse heard the news from South Africa, she got on a boat to create merry hell.
  For every famous figure like Alexander Fleming, the scientist who discovered penicillin, hundreds of Cecil Paines are in the background, and the Flemings wouldn't exist without them. Cecil Paine (1905–94) was a consultant pathologist in Sheffield in the 1930s. He was working on infections, particularly a terrible infection called puerperal fever, which was still killing thousands of mothers in childbirth. No one knew what caused puerperal fever, and the number of mothers dying from it was going up instead of down. Paine worked out that wearing a mask during the delivery helped reduce the risk, and he came so close to working out how to use penicillin to eradicate it altogether.
  But Varah learned another lesson in that girl's death. She didn't die because her periods had started; she died because, when she most needed help, she felt totally alone, with no one to turn to. Varah decided that no one should ever feel that alone again, and in 1953 he started the telephone helpline that became the Samaritans. In 1953 many families didn't have a telephone, and no one had ever thought of using telephones in that way: Varah's idea – that whoever you were, whatever the problem, if you needed help someone would always be at the end of a phone ready to listen and support, 24/7 – was genuinely visionary thinking. Not many people bring off miracles, but creating the Samaritans seems to me to make Chad Varah one of them. A truly Great Briton.