Brat Farrar

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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 That name? The boy was a foundling from an orphanage. There, Matron used a pin in a telephone directory and came up with the name Farrell. The orphan had arrived on the doorstep on St Bartholomew’s Day, and so his first name became Bart. The older orphans, in the cruel manner of children, changed Bart to Brat. Farrar came when the boy started adventuring in foreign lands and was assisting the cook in the galley of a tramp ship, where the skipper mistakenly read Farrell for Farrar. In any case, it was much more difficult to get out of this country than to get into it, if you were broke. He had shared a table at the Coventry Street Lyons one day with a man who had been trying for eighteen months to work his passage somewhere or other. "Cards!" the little man had snarled. "That's all they ever say. Where is your card? If you don't happen to belong to the Amalgamated Union of Table-napkin Folders you can't as much as help a steward set a table. I'm just waiting to see them let a sh Había oído críticas muy buenas de este libro y me daba miedo que no superara las altas expectativas, pero lo ha hecho. Se trata de un "whodunit", pero con un giro. Sigue las convenciones del género, pero para investigar un enigma real: ¿qué sucedió con los "príncipes de la torre"? ¿Quién los asesino? Cualquiera diría que fue Ricardo III, que para eso es el protagonista de la mayor obra de propaganda jamás creada por Shakespeare, ¿pero es eso cierto? 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...

This book remains an all time favourite, although I would now consider Brat Farrar as the best Tey I have read. In a way, this is why I love historical fiction, not because it sugar-coats all of the historical information and presents it in an easily digestible narrative, but because it dares to ask questions and share how the actual research of non-fictional topics can be fun. It has the power to inspire people to learn more. If you really want to know," Simon said as he got up, "I want to see June Kaye's new picture. It's at the Empire." Over that far ridge the land sloped in chequered miles to the sea and the clustered roofs of Westover. But here, in this high valley, shut off from the Channel gales and open to the sun, the trees stood up in the bright air with a midland serenity: with an air, almost, of enchantment. The scene had the bright perfection and stillness of an apparition. Character Overlap: The lawyer Kevin Macdermott also appears in The Franchise Affair. The Toselli family had previously appeared in A Shilling for Candles, which is also set in Westover and surrounding areas.

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Set in the lush rolling hills of the English countryside, our protagonist is a smart, former orphanage child who discovers that he has a startling resemblance to the missing heir to the Latchetts horse farm & estate. With the help of a former employee who knows every last detail about the estate, Farrar decides to embark on a prodigal return home that is legendary for its arrogance, gall & sheer ballsiness. Once in the midst of his "old family", Farrar knows eerie details that win the trust of family attorneys, fool siblings, & steal ownership of the inheritance of Latchetts from his "twin", evil nemesis Simon. Or does he? You'll have to find out yourself.... That withstanding, for a while this was a captivating weekend daytime drama, featuring stage actor Mark Greenstreet delivering a terrific performance as the titular character AND his brother Simon. The two exceptions to this were this book & a modern New Zealand classic, Season Of The Jew. Both of these books produced animated, thoughtful discussions & the women leading the reads did heaps of extra research. It was nice seeing what fun being part of a real life book club could be like, but I didn't join another one until I became a member of Goodreads. Online book clubs really work for me! If I can't get hold of (or don't like a choice) I don't read it. 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. There was no mystery about his not liking the work, of course. The office job had been fifty miles away, and since no ordinary lodgings could be paid for out of his salary he had had to stay in the local "boys' home." He had not known how good the orphanage was until he had sampled the boys' home. He could have supported either the job or the home, but not the two simultaneously. And of the two the office was by far the worse. It was, as a job, comfortable, leisurely, and graced with certain, if far-off, prospects; but to him it had been a prison. He was continually aware of time running past him; time that he was wasting. This was not what he wanted.

Josephine Tey’s take is more even-handed. Alan Grant is a Scotland Yard inspector who is confined to a hospital bed with a broken leg, and to while away his time he begins an investigation into the facts of this case. With the help of a young man who is doing research at the British Museum, he begins to eliminate all the historical records and put together only the known facts of what was actually being done, where principals were, and what is known irrefutably to be true. He reaches a conclusion that it would be difficult to disagree with, and that version does not match the high school history books. 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. have forgotten," Nancy said, wondering. "The worst of pushing horrible things down into one's subconscious is that when they pop up again they are as fresh as if they had been in a refrigerator. You haven't allowed time to get at them to—to mould them over a little." The Publisher Says: Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant is intrigued by a portrait of Richard III. Could such a sensitive face actually belong to a heinous villain — a king who killed his brother's children to secure his crown? Grant seeks what kind of man Richard was and who in fact killed the princes in the tower. The Daughter of Time - Still Tey’s most enduringly popular mystery. Can a bed-ridden 20th-century detective solve a 500-year-old crime?No queens had come to Latchetts to dine; no cavaliers to hide. For three hundred years it had stood in its meadows very much as it stood now; a yeoman's dwelling. And for nearly two of those three hundred years Ashbys had lived in it.

I first read this novel donkeys’ years ago in paper form. This time, when reading it again as a buddy read with two lovely and talented GoodReads pals, Delee and Lisa, I utterly melted as I listened to the amazing Derek Jacobi’s mellifluous voice as the narrator. If you can get The Daughter of Time as an audiobook, be sure to do so! No, but which was the cleverest?" said Jane, who never departed from a path once her feet were on it.And although I certainly now no longer have the massive literary and historical crush on (to and for me sadly misunderstood and unjustly maligned) Richard III that I had in 1984 (when I was a lonely teenager and read The Daughter of Time for a high school English literature project) I still and nevertheless firmly believe and continue to agree with Josephine Tey and her literary creation Alan Grant that Henry VII actually had considerably more and obvious reasons for wanting the two princes in the tower removed, for needing them to be gone forever than Richard III did (as they in my opinion were much more of a potential obstacle and threat to the former’s path to the English throne than to the latter). For Edward, Richard and their sister Elizabeth had indeed been declared illegitimate by an act of parliament (and whether wrongfully or rightfully does not really all that much matter here). However, after their uncle Richard III's death in battle and the repeal of said very parliamentary act which had declared Edward IV's and Elizabeth Woodville's children illegitimate (and this indeed needed to happen for Henry Tudor to be able to legally wed Elizabeth of York), the two princes in the tower would of course then have been first and second in line to the English throne, and their claim to the British throne was always much stronger and considerably more solid than Henry Tudor's own claim ever was. And with the children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville suddenly no longer illegitimate, young Edward would have of course been king, with his brother Richard his heir apparent (and no, NOT Henry Tudor).