The Daughter of Time
I’ll be perfectly honest – this is not the kind of book I’d read normally. A Fifties police procedural about an upright police detective who investigates a historical mystery? Not my cup of tea!
However I was reading a thread about a book I love – The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford and lots of people said that if you want some historical context then The Daughter of Time was the most palatable way to get it.
So I picked it up via the wonder that is inter-library loan. Libraries rock.
This brief book was written in 1951 and, given that some of it’s attitudes towards women and anyone who isn’t English are quite appalling, I found it quite entertaining.
The major thrust of the book is that common knowledge or the historical record is frequently a lot of rubbish and doesn’t exactly match what really happened, which he then applies to the story of Richard III. As a result it’s ironic that he accepts establishment interpretations of controversial events as examples of how historical events and the facts don’t always marry up.
If you like a detective story, or historical sleuthing then you might love this book. Personally, as primer to the fall of the Plantagenet dynasty, I found it enlightening.