Metto due testi in Lingua Inglese (che ho utilizzato per un esame), così se qualcuno vuole ha materiale.^^
Appena trovo un po' di tempo per vivere registro qualcosina pure io...

Elizabeth and Mary



It was apparent that a woman in possession of a throne must marry and do so without delay. All biblical and classical texts stressed the natural order of the male’s domination over the female. The female monarch was a rare and unnatural phenomenon which could only be regularised by speedy union with a prince, who’d rule over her in private and guide her in her public God-given role as queen.
In early 1558, Mary Stuart was fifteen and had been a queen since she was six days old. She’d never known any other state. Having lived from the age of five at the centre of the powerful French court, Mary had grown into a charming and accomplished French princess, destined to become the wife of the Dauphin of France. Mary would marry her prince on 24th April 1558. François, the beloved companion of her childhood, and King Henri II’s eldest son, was just fourteen years old.
In England, Elizabeth Tudor was twenty-four years old, living quietly in the country at Hatfield some thirty miles north of London. She had been bastardised, disinherited, often in danger and was always waiting, never certain of the prize. Edward IV had died in 1553, unmarried and childless aged sixteen. He was followed not by either of his elder half-sisters but by their hapless teenage cousin, Lady Jane Grey. Sacrificed to further the ambitions of her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, she was queen for barely nine days. Immediately imprisoned, she was executed seven months later. Now in 1558 Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary Tudor, had been queen for nearly five years.
Suspicious, suffering, devoutly Catholic and zealous to maintain the supremacy of the old faith, Mary’s worst mistake had been her insistence on marrying Philip II of Spain, for the English hated foreigners meddling in their affairs and they hated the Spanish most of all.
The fanatical purges of heresy, the torture and burnings of hundreds of martyrs would earn Mary the epithet Bloody Mary, the dreadful spectacles alienating her subjects’ affections for their queen and strengthening the reformist support. Nature seemed to be against Mary too for the harvests also failed two years in succession. In 1556 the people were dying of starvation. The following year they were ravaged by disease as various epidemics swept the land. Famine and pestilence: was this god’s retribution for the sins of Mary’s reign?
By the beginning of 1558 Mary was herself sick and in despair. Longing for a child and heir, in desperation she’d made herself believe she was pregnant again. Her delusion was evident even to her courtiers. No one could know, however, that the symptoms which Mary interpreted as the beginning of new life and hope were instead harbingers of death.


Sophie's World


....Then she sat down on a kitchen stool with the mysterious letter in her hand.
Who are you?
She had no idea. She was Sophie Amundsen, of course, but who was that? She had not really figured that out – yet.
What if she had been given a different name? Anne Knutsen, for instance. Would she then have been someone else?
She suddenly remembered that Dad had originally wanted her to be called Lillemor. Sophie tried to imagine herself shaking hands and introducing herself as Lillemor Amundsen, but it seemed all wrong. It was someone else who kept introducing herself.
She jumped up and went into the bathroom with the strange letter in her hand. She stood in front of the mirror and stared into her own eyes.
‘I am Sophie Amundsen,’ she said.
The girl in the mirror did not react with as much as a twitch. Whatever Sophie did, she did exactly the same. Sophie tried to beat her reflection to it with a lightening movement but the other girl was just as fast.
‘Who are you?’ Sophie asked.
She received no response to this either, but felt a momentary confusion as to whether it was she or her reflection who had asked the question.
Sophie pressed her index finger to the nose in the mirror and said, ‘You are me.’
As she got no answer to this, she turned the sentence around and said, ‘I am you.’
Sophie Amundsen was often dissatisfied with her appearance. She was frequently told that she had beautiful almond-shaped eyes, but that was probably just something people said because her nose was too small and her mouth was a bit too big. And her ears were much too close to her eyes. Worst of all was her straight hair, which it was impossible to do anything with. Sometimes her father would stroke her hair and call her ‘the girl with the flaxen hair,’ after a piece of music by Claude Debussy. It was all right for him, he was not condemned to living with this straight hair. Neither mousse nor styling gel had the slightest effect on Sophie’s hair. Sometimes she thought she was so ugly that she was malformed at birth. Her mother always went on about her difficult labor. But wasd that really what determined how you looked?
Wasn’t it odd that she didn’t know who she was? And wasn’t it unreasonable that she hadn’t been allowed to have any say in what she would look like? Her looks had just been dumped on her. She could choose her own friends, but she certainly hadn’t chosen herself. She had not even chosen to be a human being.
What was a human being?
Sophie looked up at the girl in the mirror again.
‘I think I’ll go upstairs and do my biology homework,’ she said, almost apologetically.