In Gregory's case it's the case of Scott's "tangled web we weave". Having first promoted herself as such she is now lumbered with justifying her exaggerated role, even in the light of the ample evidence to the contrary which, with rather delicious irony, she is piling up against herself. If sales of her books initially had succeeded without recourse to that particular lie she would be in a lot less trouble now. Her problem now is that exposure as a fraud will definitely damage her saleability.

ferval wrote:

I’m still struggling with this historical fiction business and why someone like DB or PG feels the need to justify what could be simply a work of imagination and a good story with a gloss of historical accuracy. Is it so that the reader can feel that they are reading something more elevated and worthwhile than just a tale

Dare I mention the (in)famous Historical Jesus thread?

Quote :

The White Queen, a new ten-part drama for BBC One

You can look forward to:- "a stunningly rich tale of love and loss, seduction and deception, betrayal and murder", "The House of York’s young and devilishly handsome Edward IV", "The most beautiful woman in the land, Elizabeth Woodville marries for the love of her King, with the help of her mother Jacquetta , a self proclaimed sorceress".
“One of the most ambitious series the BBC has made, this 10-part series is an epic drama that makes real history as gripping as the best fiction, featuring a cast of extraordinary new talent and some of our finest actors. “

Now, go and lie down in a darkened room.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/white-queen.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/celebritymoney/article-2200999/Jamie-Oliver-JK-Rowling-50-biggest-selling-authors-time.html

Philippa is at number 50 - the value of her books (not her estimated wealth) is a puny £25.8m.

I wonder what film/TV rights are worth?

The expression "laughing all the way..." comes to mind.

Jamie Oliver is a bit of a shock coming in second with his cook books.

If someone a woeful as Dan Brown can make 6th then I would have expected PG to be higher. As much as we may rubbish her she still remains fairly popular.

This theses on PGs historical inaccuracies is an interesting read

http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2012-0806-200542/BA%20Thesis%20Lisanne%20Pol%20%283467902%29.pdf

Edit. I've been searching the web for a decent site refuting PG's writing and I'm pleased to announce that, so far, I've come across Res His links 3 times. We're famous!

Doesn't this cover say it all?

Three essays, of about equal length, but PHILIPPA GREGORY is clearly the only one who deserves those flattering HUGE RED LETTERS.

Poor old David Baldwin and Michael Jones - two scholarly and interesting historians, but obviously not in the same league as the lady.

PS "Using original documents, site visits and even archaeology, Philippa Gregory creates the first biography ever written of the young duchess."

*Even* archaeology??

PG gets down and dirty! She obviously heard someone else was having some success with a thing called "Bring Up The Bodies" so she's decided she'd better get cracking herself if that's what it takes to be the expertest historian in the whole wide world.

Do you have to buy a special trowel if you want to become an archaeologist? Or can I use the one that does for my herbaceous borders?

If you're PG you just claim someone else's trowel as your own.

Indeed you do Temp and it's universally understood on site that the more senior the archaeologist, the smaller the trowel.

The Duchess, The Queen and the King's Mother - PHILLIPA GREGORY.

Heavens, she's talking about herself! Is the title set out deliberate? Or in true PG style, just badly done?

Today Philippa Gregory will be interviewed on our radio. The usual interviewer is away and we have a very gentle woman doing this interview. However, by the time we get to talking to authors they are normally treated very easily with the emphasis on their present writing and success. Though there was one famous one between our best and sharpest interviewer and Jeffery Archer. I think he walked out, or else he was very insulting about her. I unfortunately never heard it. From a later news story on her: "The debate with the head of Women's Refuge unleashes some of Kim Hill's trademark weapons: the laugh that says "you obviously cannot be serious", the "oh hello" and "oh puh-lease" of disagreement, questions full of small, sharp words.

You know it's good radio when you sometimes feel sorry for the politicians.

Some, however, are beyond pity. One of her legendary on-air battles was with English author Jeffrey Archer soon after she started her show in 1993. A bristling Lord Archer, warned of Hill's reputation, came "armed and dangerous" and blew up without provocation."

Gregory is going to be telling us who she gets into the minds of famous English historical figures, especially women. Apparently.

Temperance wrote:

Do you have to buy a special trowel if you want to become an archaeologist? Or can I use the one that does for my herbaceous borders?

This is what you have to have Temp, and a bargain at 65 quid (not including p&p), http://www.pasthorizonstools.com/The_Archaeologists_Toolkit_p/tk001.htm . All self respecting archaeologists have 'em apparently.

Oh, I don't like that at all, ID. I don't want to look like a plumber's mate. Don't they do a more stylish roll - in a nice soft leather?

I'm sure Philippa Gregory wouldn't have been seen dead carrying anything like that when she made her various site visits.

Philippa wouldn't visit in person, I don't think. She'd have her people do it for her. Unless there was a Time Team camera crew around, of course.

Temperance wrote:

Oh, I don't like that at all, ID. I don't want to look like a plumber's mate. Don't they do a more stylish roll - in a nice soft leather?

I'm sure Philippa Gregory wouldn't have been seen dead carrying anything like that when she made her various site visits.

I suppose one must keep up standards, even when scrambling through ancient cess pits and assorted muck. I wonder if ferval has a swanky designer leather one?

Nope, she definitely doesn't. Swanky just ain't my style and I wouldn't dream of paying their daft prices. £14.95 for a leaf and square - mine was £2.99 from the diy shop and my padded gel gloves come from Lidl when they're having a cycling offer. Everything rolls about with my flask and sarnies in a very disreputable rucksack.

I can just visualise PG being ushered round the site by the site director who presumably has a trowel but it's never seen unless the TV cameras are there.
I'll bet they put down nice clean duck boards for her dainty tootsies and serve tea in a hastily erected gazebo.

Never mind killing yourself with all those essays and exams, ferval. This is all it takes to be an archaeologist these days: a nice Mulberry bag for all your bits and pieces.

For a *real* fashion statement, though, I'd have my toolkit in a Fugger heart-shaped bag - soft, very pale leather. A teeny weeny bit pretentious maybe, but a nod to Mantel's genius that would really p*ss PG off. "Do you like my bag, Philippa?" I'd shout at her as she was ushered round the site. "Got the idea from Hilary, you know!"

PS Actually I hate to admit it, but I do rather like that Mulberry bag. Reminds me of my school satchel. It costs about £900.

I can just see ferval scrambing around digs in those shoes too! The tartan is a nice touch though..........

Blinking paparazzi, just won't leave a girl alone.

Right, that's it, does anyone know how to hire a hit man? I disapprove of defacing books but I fear I will be forced to abandon my principles and excise some pages from a book.
I've bought a book for the wean's Christmas " Big Questions from Little People" which has responses to the questions that children ask from the likes of Chumsky, de Botton, Attenborough etc but who do they have answering "Why was Guy Fawkes so naughty?"? Yes, the dreaded PG and her reply reads as if it had been written by an objectionable, precocious 8 year old. At least it's so bad that it would put any discerning child off her for life.

Fans of PG will be delighted with the following press release summing up her 2012 output and which included:

"Gregory also released “Changeling”, May 29, the first book in her teen series, “Order of Darkness”. Beginning in Rome, “Changeling” tells the story of seventeen-year-old Luca Vero, who is expelled from a monastery when his belief in the new science labels him a heretic. Luca is recruited into a secret sect known as The Order of the Dragon, which was commissioned by Pope Nicholas IV to investigate evil and strange occurrences. Luca soon finds love when he goes to a nunnery to investigate seventeen-year-old Isolde, accused of witchcraft. Luca and Isolde, along with companions Freize and Ishraq, journey across Europe on behalf of The Order of the Dragon, on an adventure filled with werewolves, alchemists, witches and death-dancers."

The poor Boleyn girls hadn't a chance, had they?

(Ishraq, I take it, is a Moor in the "Robin Hood: Men In Tights" tradition - you know, those hundreds of thousands of young black men who wandered all over Europe in the early middle ages having great adventures with their white buddies while never once encountering a nasty racist comment. For Ishraq it's a good thing these lads went ahead of her - she's a young black muslim girl of the period.)

EDIT: Just found this marvellous quote from it (and remember, the year is 1485 or thereabouts):
Brigand (accosting our heroines by surprise in the woods): “Now, little ladies, put your hands in the air…and nobody will get hurt.”

Or this one from "The Other Boleyn Girl":

“You can smile when your heart is breaking because you're a woman.”


Cue Nat King Cole singing Charlie Chaplin ...

Give that girl on the steps a Mulberry handbag and she'll be right as rain in a jiffy...

Gregory is indeed a rich mine for quotations; my favourite is one from the book Minette calls Gregory's Captain Birdseye novel: "The White Queen" (the one about Elizabeth Woodville and her fishy ancestors).

“He promised her that he would give her everything, everything she wanted, as men in love always do. And she trusted him despite herself, as women in love always do.”

That's from the first verse of Ricky Valance's "Tell Laura I Love Her", isn't it?




Or knowing PG's extensive research techniques, maybe this:

"I felt so helpless, what could I do? Remembering all the things we'd been through..."

Oh sorry, that's not Mary Boleyn, it's Mary Weiss (great song).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-R7j6NuuJI

"Please wait at the gates of heaven for me, Terry".

I can't remember now where or how how Terry died - perhaps it was at the Second Battle of St. Albans.

My word, I think we've cracked PG's sources!

Here's the quote from "The Other Boleyn Girl":

“I was born to be your rival,' she [Anne] said simply. 'And you mine. We're sisters, aren't we?”

And here's the Boleyn sisters in a little known Tudor romp providing the basis of PG's concept (with Danny Kaye as "Bluff King Halitosis" and Bing the Ming as "Gorgeous George Boleyn". The sisters play themselves, badly)



One of those sisters is George Clooney's aunt, which makes him about 15th in line for the throne I reckon. But not if he's the product of incense or similarly spelt PG plot devices, in which case Vera Allen should get it posthumously. I can sense a sequel in the works ...

And it gets worse - this from "The Lady of the Rivers" (described on PG's own website as "A sweeping, powerful story rich in passion and legend and drawing on years of research"):

“The wheel of fortune [...] tells us that we all only want victory. We all want to triumph. But we all have to learn to endure what comes. We have to learn to treat misfortune and great fortune with indifference. That is wisdom.”

And this from Kay Starr, part-time mother of Elizabeth Woodville (she shares the role with a real mother and some dipstick called Potato Jacket or similar according to PG):

“I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't do anything but think about him. At night I dream of him, all day I wait to see him, and when I do see him my heart turns over and I think I will faint with desire.” ("The Other Boleyn Girl")


At which Anne smiled knowingly as she remembered all the times she'd heard Claude and the others singing the sensible girl's anthem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=001JlTfLZPE

EDIT: Decided to delete Bayonce's Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It). It's a great song, though!

Probably over-egging the pudding adding another one, but thought La Gregotty (thanks to Minette for "Gregotty" - one of her classic spellings, entirely appropriate for PG - a lovely combination of Gregory and Grotty) might find these lyrics useful. It *is* quite easy to confuse Elvis with Richard III - we've all done it at some time or another.

"It was a rainy night, the night the king went down. Everybody was crying - it seemed like sadness had surrounded the town...Even in the darkest of nights, you can always hear the King's call.

And they put him away in Memphis, six feet beneath the clay..."

Just remember they put R3 away in Leicester, not Memphis, Pippa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIEAf3htdt8

Well it has happened again, on today's episode of Mudmen at Fulham Palace, we had PG's (in a lovely pink trench coat with matching sandals ) brilliant expertise on the topic. Introduced to us as 'an award winning author and Tudor Historian'!

Found a better version of "Chapel of Love". Look out for the dancers about a minute into the track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkfEjLOet7k

But I much prefer this - "My Boyfriend's Back" - by the same group (the Angels?). A possible link to Kat Howard's years at Horsham here (see Gregory's "The Boleyn Inheritance").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NuofNHKbVc

And this from Gregory's "The Other Boleyn Girl" (which I assume means the one other to the actual Boleyn girls and who is totally a figment of PG's rather torrid imagination)

But let's not forget that fantastically Beatlesque and oh-so prophetic paean to Gregory's entire ouevre from The Knickerbockers in 1965:

And finally GaGa channelling Anne addressing Henry, though the title also seems to indicate that Anne might even have predicted Gregory ...



I'll shut up now.

I see The White Queen is being made by the same people behind the god-awful British Civil War drama The Devil's Whore. If there are any battle scenes, expect there to be as many as six extras, and the sets will be of finest cardboard.

Quote :

and the sets will be of finest cardboard

Matches the characters then.

The first trailer for The White Queen has aired - no actual clips included, presumably so the content won't put viewers off! Incidentally, flicking through magazines in a shop the other day I came across an interview with Ms Gregory - she was going on and on about the amount of research she does, and how it's essential that historical fiction - whether literary or filmed - should be factually accurate. Surprisingly, it wasn't a spoof...

This wouldn't be based on "The White Queen" by a certain P Gregory in which a changeling is spirited into the tower so that the young Duke of York can be whisked off to the lowlands, only to return as an eleven year old Perkin Warbeck later to reclaim his birthright in a four year campaign culminating in his death at the age of 25?

Her pretensions to historical accuracy are (mildly put) suspect. Her pretensions to mathematical accuracy are imbecilic.

Quote :

"The Last Days of Anne Boleyn" In a radical new approach to televised history, a stellar cast of writers and historians, including Hilary Mantel, David Starkey, Philippa Gregory and others, battle out the story of her last days and give their own unique interpretations of her destruction.

Next Tuesday, BBC 2. I'll await your reactions with some considerable interest.

Oh dear, they've started showing the trailers for The White Queen already, three times this evening so far, and it looks even worse than you've led me to expect. Surely they're not serious,it seems to be a campfest of totally overwrought screaming, heaving bosoms, rippling muscles and smouldering passions, in which case it could be wonderfully dreadful and a case of suspend the critical faculties and just wallow in the sheer transcendent awfulness of it all.

This TV Tudor loop is terribly tedious. Makes one think that perhaps the wrong lot won on the the Bosworth field after all. We might then have had musicals such as Richard the Thiird in Springtime.... on reflection, we still might.

The frocks are nice.

Just a reminder that it's "The Last Days of Anne Boleyn" tonight - BBC2 9.00pm.

David Starkey, Hilary Mantel and the sickeningly young and beautiful Dr Suzannah Lipscomb all argue about Anne.

Actually the Radio Times is a bit scathing about this first programme in the latest BBC Tudor season. It says that "this retelling of Anne Boleyn's tragedy relies for its visuals on mock Tudor reconstructions that are as convincing as a half-timbered garage." Oh dear.

Res Historica's favourite historical expert isn't actually mentioned in the programme's blurb, but I suspect she'll sneak in somewhere, a bit like Alfred Hitchcock.

I wish I could get those sort of programmes here. I'll just have to wait until Trike posts the links on Youtube. You really do not know how fortunate you are with the BBC, for all its faults. French TV is, with just a few exceptions (eg. "Les Racines et des Ailes") an almost unutterably dire round of Star Academy, chat shows, dubbed American soap operas, and, scraping the very bottom of the broadcasting barrel, all the so-called reality TV shows. Yet people seem to lap it all up, if my guests are anything to go by. Frankly it makes the endless dubbed repeats of "Inspector Barnaby" - or as you will probably know it, ITV's "Midsommer Murders" detective series - seem almost high culture by comparison.

And I'm miffed that I can't see,

Quote :

... the sickeningly young and beautiful Dr Suzannah Lipscomb.

... who sounds as though she has just stepped out of one of Mervyn Peakes's 'Ghormenghast' books. She certainly sounds like she'd be a match for Dr Prunesquallor anyway ... and maybe a rival for the swan-necked Irma! But I digress.

On Youtube I'm finishing an old BBC production of "Victorian Pharmacy" tonight - located via another Trike Youtube link (many thanks again ).

But it's the last of the Victorian Farm/ Edwardian Farm/ Wartime Farm/ Tudor Feast etc progs... and I'm already feeling bereft. These programmes have kept me going for a couple of months. What am I going to watch now?

(Any suggestions for future watching - preferably with Youtube links - gratfeully received).

Quote :

I don't know youtube links or even what is presently on the BBC (which from NZ's television pov seems absolutely wonderful too), but we have been enjoying Parade's End and now some drama about Bletchley Park which I roamed in to watch just as the credits went up, but my husband said it was excellent.

The programme, despite the half-timbered garages, was much better than I expected: it certainly illustrated the truth of the comment, "All you get when you put two (or more) historians in a room together is an argument."

Philippa Gregory (yes, our girl was there - first to speak!) was predictably annoying; she mentioned the deformed baby theory as if it were entirely her own idea - no credit given to the respected academic, Retha M. Warnicke, who first put forward the interesting hypothesis that Anne miscarried a defective baby boy in January 1536, a tragedy in the royal nursery that sent Henry into a tailspin panic about witchcraft and divine wrath. Perhaps just as well that Warnicke's name was *not* mentioned for - as anyone who has actually read her "The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn" knows - the Professor of History at Arizona State University *never* claims, as Gregory blithely pronounced last night, that a midwife reported that the child was abnormal. Warnicke does, however, offer other varied and fascinating evidence for her theory: her bibliography, notes and references cover sixty-five pages! Her penultimate chapter, "Sexual Heresy" convinced me, although it must be said that it has not convinced many others (an exception being the late Sir Geoffrey Elton, who read Warnicke's original manuscript, and who was extremely interested in what she had to say - pity he's not around any more to comment).

As for Nicholas Sander, whom Hilary Mantel mentioned when she rather scathingly dismissed the deformed foetus comments, Warnicke fully acknowledges that Sander's ideas, including the "shapeless mass" claim, in his "De origine et progressu schismatic Anglicani", must be treated with extreme caution. In fact she devotes an entire appendix to "The Legacy of Nicholas Sanders".

But Narky Starkey won the day for me. I agreed with everything he said about Cromwell acting under orders, even if TC did dream up all the brilliant details of the coup. Cromwell, as always, was acting as jackal to Henry's lion. The pair of them, I think, have fooled some of last night's experts as much as they fooled Eustace Chapuys way back in 1536.

Another Tudor treat tonight - Diarmaid MacCulloch (lovely man) on Cromwell the Enforcer. Yippee .

Suzannah Lipscomb was another one who didn't acknowledge where she got her ideas from.

She spoke about the letter Chapuys sent to Charles V, dated June 6th 1536, one part of which is usually quoted to show that Cromwell admitted that he had "planned and brought about the whole affair". Lipscomb quite correctly said that the rest of the letter is very important. Yes, but she surely should have added that it was John Schofield who first raised this point. Schofield discusses the lettter in some detail in Chapter 8 of his superb biography "The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell: Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant", devoting several pages to an analysis of the content and language (it's written in diplomatic French) of Chapuys' letter. Schofield ends his analysis thus:

"The reader now has all the evidence commonly cited for Cromwell's alleged perfidy against Anne Boleyn. It comprises fly-by-night stories from Alesius and the "Spanish Chronicle", words of Chapuys taken out of context and an untrustworthy translation in the Calendar of State Papers. As a result, a wholly imaginary power struggle between Anne and Cromwell, unnoticed by Chapuys and all other contemporary witnesses, now dominates many modern accounts of Anne's last weeks. This, unfortunately, is the chief problem with faction theories and conspiracy theories - they succeed only in diverting attention away from the central point. The threat to Anne in spring 1536 came not from Cromwell but from her intimidating husband, now in love with another woman, and from the Seymour party, eager to exploit the king's affections and hasten Jane to the throne... Cromwell became involved in the royal marital drama only when Henry ordered him onto the case..."

Sorry for the long quote, but I think it's unfair that neither Warnicke nor Schofield - or their research - got a mention in the programme.

EDIT: Forgot to say thank you to Trike for posting the YouTube of "The Last Days of Anne Boleyn" over on the Historical Videos thread.

Must add too that I think Alison Weir should do something about her hair - all that money from her books and it's such a mess, all lank and greasy. A good, sharp cut and some L'Oreal shampoo and she'd be a new woman. And I did like David Starkey's stripey glasses - very trendy.

EDIT 2: Just seen that you've also posted last night's programme about Thomas Cromwell, Trike. Thank you

Just a few more lines on this thread, then I really will try to shut up.

Should all "celebrity" historians/historical writers be shot, not just PG? Is self-promotion - either on the television or on Twitter - now more important than the actual study of history?

This latest BBC "Tudor feast" - with all its famous and/or glamorous participants - is unsettling me dreadfully. It's making me feel great sympathy for all the ordinary historians in our universities, those who plod away, day in, day out, trying to combine teaching with doing their own research, and with making the necessary effort to keep up-to-date with others' research. They must be pretty sick watching these programmes, seeing all the rich pickings - money and fame - going to those who are brilliant self-publicists rather than rigorous and dedicated academics.

Not David Starkey (or Diarmaid MacCulloch) though. Like Starkey or loathe him, he's the real thing (whatever the real thing is these days - I honestly don't think I know any more), and he was, by all accounts, an excellent tutor during his time teaching, especially when he was at the LSE.

And Mantel is in a class of her own.

But some of the others? Are they all scrambling onto a hugely lucrative bandwagon? The dithery Professor Bernard, for example - who made a brief, almost apologetic appearance during Thursday's programme - should be shot. His recent book on Anne Boleyn was dire, a great disappointment, not simply because he tried to persuade us all that the woman was guilty as charged (fair enough), but because his argument was just so weak and unconvincing. "Fatal Attractions" (dreadful, ssensational title - says it all) was nowhere good as his excellent (and scholarly) "The King's Reformation". Bernard seems to have churned out this latest offering in a mad rush without really believing himself what he was writing. The book was controversial all right, but contrived. Cashing in on the current mania for the Tudors? But it sold well, no doubt adding nicely to the good professor's pension pot.

Lacey Baldwin Smith (he who described the wretched Catherine Howard as "a juvenile delinquent") has got a new book on Anne Boleyn coming out soon; Lord, they're all at it. What a money-spinner our Tudors - and our Plantagenets (mentioning no names) - have become.

But I'm probably - if I'm honest - just jealous. In my next life I want to look like Suzannah Lipscomb, write like Hilary Mantel and be paid thousands for wittering about the Tudors on the tele.