[gmw]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Well, I enjoyed the book, and I don’t know how much that was influenced by my early affection for it because it made me look at Richard III with new eyes.

I think this was a particularly important point when it was written (and for some time after). It was something different for the time, and it introduced a much wider audience to the sorts of questions raised by others, like The Richard III Society (which would have been much harder to find back then).

There was a line in the book: "It was shocking how little history remained with one after a good education."

My reaction was: It is shocking how Shakespeare has rewritten history. My history teachers never tried to correct the history we were learning in English classes, but how can we not be influenced by his powerful, but entirely fictional, representations of so many key figures from history?

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Yes, of course the attitudes referred to by gmw and issybird are appalling to us. But I think they were absolutely normal in England for 1951, when the book was published. I’m not suggesting that makes them okay, but I don’t think Tey should be cast into outer darkness for reflecting the attitudes of the day.

I don't buy this. Christie's Poirot and Hastings were made up in the 1920s and they were sexist but they were never this objectionable - and there are more examples (Sayers' Lord Wimsey comes to mind). It was not the sexism (nor the racism of the first book), but how these come together with everything else in the character of Grant as someone with little empathy or consideration for others. It makes him very hard to like. And even this might have been acceptable if I thought the impression was deliberate, but it never seemed like that to me.

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

[...] One thing I really enjoyed this time around was the easy access that the Internet gives us to so many of these documents. I would never have dreamed I could read the Titulus Regius back when I read the book all those decades ago. But I did read it with much fascination online a few days ago.

Certainly it makes a huge difference having the resources we have now. To instantly see where there various characters fit together in time. To have had so many people have spent so much time studying the few known facts and assembling many and varied possibilities means we are spoilt for information now. It hasn't really helped us get any closer to the truth, it seems to me, but at least it has shown the historical assumptions for what they were.