Brat Farrar

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Astride the farther lion was a small boy clad in a leopard-skin rug with green baize edging, a seaside pail worn helmet-wise, and nothing else that was visible. A very long brass poker stood up lance-wise from its rest on his bare foot. If you take the "players" in The War of the Roses, and place them in more modern times- one could almost compare them to The Mob fighting for control of their territory... The "Daughter of Time" title is a quotation from the work of Sir Francis Bacon: "Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority."

One very small quibble which I have with the story is that Inspector Grant is drawn into this investigation after examining a copy of a portrait of Richard III. He and others see many different things in the face of Richard. However it is a painting not a photograph. What is in the face was put there by a painter. It may or may not be true to the actual face. Richard himself may have demanded changes from what the artist first painted. I still wonder," Bee said unhappily, "whether we should have allowed the body that was found on the Castleton beach to be buried over there. A pauper's burial, it was."You're offering me the sweetest chance for a double-cross that I ever heard of. I take your coaching, pass the exam, and forget about you. And you wouldn't be able to do a thing about it. How did you figure to keep tabs on me?" Francis Matthews (who was the brilliant Paul Temple) hams it up as a foppish actor who talks Brat into impersonating someone thought to have committed suicide years before. Richard III had been credited with the elimination of two nephews, and his name was a synonym for evil. But Henry VII, whose ‘settled and considered policy’ was to eliminate a whole family was regarded as a shrewd and far-seeing monarch. Not very lovable perhaps, but constructive and painstaking, and very successful withal. Grant gave up. History was something that he would never understand. The values of historians differed so radically from any values with which he was acquainted that he could never hope to meet them on any common ground. I've come for the eggs," she said, "but there's no hurry, is there? It's wonderful to sit and do nothing."

The Rector says that Ulysses was probably a frightful nuisance round the house," said the undeviating Jane. Well, it is a long time ago, Bee. And—well, I suppose one's mind tidies away the things it can't hear to remember. Bill and Nora—that was frightful, but it

I puzzled over the title until I found the key to its meaning online in a quotation by Sir Francis Bacon. I have quoted it above. I couldn’t help wondering if the general public was so much smarter in 1951 that they would have immediately recognized the reference, since the book I read is obviously an original copy from the era, and Tey included nothing to explain the title...not even a reference to the quotation on the frontis plate. A fictitious Scotland Yard Inspector, hospitalised following a fall, sets to work with the aid of a young, fictional American research assistant, to look into the life of the much maligned Richard III. They focus on contemporary/ near contemporary chroniclers and records of the time and also what successive historians have written about the man and the King. The 2 men work well and happily together. Using his detective skills Inspector Grant sifts the evidence and the collaborators find Richard resoundingly not guilty of the crimes levelled against him by history – ie of murdering, or causing to be murdered, his 2 young nephews, the Princes in the Tower. They conclude that such a crime was wholly out of character, and that he had no motive for bringing about their deaths. The evidence for their conclusions is striking and difficult to argue against. When my old home, Clare, was sold—after my father's death— Nancy bundled together all the personal things in my room and sent them to me. A whole trunkful of rubbish, which I have never had the energy to get rid of, and a large proportion of it consists of snapshots and photographs of the companions of my youth. I think you would find it very interesting."

I think for me, the book excels most at capturing the tense atmosphere. I genuinely could not put it down when I was reading and I ended up finishing it in two sittings. amigo. There was a ship of that repellent title at Westover the day the boy disappeared. I know because I spent most of the day painting her. On canvas, not on her plates, you understand. And the old scow went out before I had finished; bound for the Channel Islands. All my ships go out before I have finished painting them." Brat is a nice man, and isn’t particularly swayed by the idea of an inheritance – what really gets him is the idea that he’ll get to work with a whole stableful of premium horses. Brat is an orphan (his name is a corruption of St Bartholomew’s Orphanage) and has made his way in the world through being on a ranch in America. Man, he loves horses almost as much as Josephine Tey thinks the reader loves horses. So he had gone to lunch, and the man had talked and been charming. But always behind the lively puffy eyes there had been that quizzical, amused, almost unbelieving look. That look was more eloquent than any of his subsequent argument. Truly he, Brat Farrar,But Alec Loding's main interest in the Ashby coming-of-age was to blow the celebrations sky-high. Indeed, he was at this moment actively engaged in pulling strings to that end. It's been a long time since I read Mrs. Tey's novel, but I get the impression that this miniseries is a faithful, careful adaptation. The miniseries certainly honours the cleverness and cunning of the novel, which keeps the readers on their intellectual toes from start to finish. Was it native honesty, he thought, staring at the Pimlico ceiling, or his good orphanage training that had made his unpaid laundry bill bulk so large in the subsequent mental struggle? A boy who had no money and no bed for the night should hardly have been concerned with the ethics of bilking a laundry of two-and-threepence. A clever little book which causes me something of a dilemma – do I put it on the fiction shelf or that reserved for non fiction? Clifton James wrote a book about it called “I Was Monty’s Double” in 1954, and it was filmed with the same title in 1958 starring John Mills.