Book Reviews
-
Peter Corris, “the godfather of Australian crime”, has died at the age of 76. His name may not be all that well known to us (well, to me, I confess) but he was clearly a towering force in the literature of his home country. When I received notice of this obituary, it was stated that he…
-
On the book front, I am rather excited about GRANT ME THE CARVING OF MY NAME, an upcoming anthology of fiction about Richard III , which should be out right in time to make a fabulous Christmas present. Release date is scheduled for December 2 and all proceeds from sales will go to the Scoliosis…
-
The Mythology of the “Princes in the Tower”
“Tudor” propaganda, Bethnal Green, books, Charles II, dental evidence, Edward V, Elizabeth Roberts, Garden Tower, Glenn Moran, Henry Pole the Younger, identification, illegitimacy, John Ashdown-Hill, Joy Ibsen, Leicester dig, mtDNA evidence, pre-contract, Richard III, Richard of Shrewsbury, The Mythology of the “Princes in the Tower”, The Private Life of Edward IV, Three Estates, Westminster AbbeyThis is less a book and more of an outdoor swimming pool, becoming deeper as the chapters progress. In the shallow end, the subjects go from the definition of a “prince” and the circumstances under which Edward IV’s elder sons came to live there, centuries before Buckingham Palace was built to the origin of the…
-
The Travels of Leo of Rozmital in the 15th century are fascinating, and if you register (free) for a virtual library card here you can read about them for 14 days. You can access up to five books all told. Between 1465 and 1467 Leo (a Bohemian nobleman and celebrated jouster who died this day in…
-
The above illustrations show two royal widows. On the left Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, mother of both Edward IV and Richard III. On the right an imagined meeting between Edward IV and the widow he was to marry, Elizabeth Woodville. In this modern age, when we are striving to live longer and longer, it’s…
-
I have just seen a review of Chris Skidmore’s biography of Richard III which has got me rather incensed. Now, I have to admit first of all that I haven’t read the book in question, because I have heard from several reliable sources that it is biased against Richard, despite claiming to be neutral, so…
-
This song was written in conjunction with the Mortimer History Society for Philip Hume’s book about the noble family.
-
In this article, about revising the reputation of Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, I wrote of the 2017 biography of the prince by Michael Jones, in which an undoubted stain on the prince’s memory was reconsidered. The prince apparently ordered the sack the city of Limoges, and slaughter of at least 3,000 inhabitants. This number, and…
The New Murrey and Blue blog 