Hillside Meditations

“Smile I can and murder while I smile” is not all that is to know about Richard III Plantagenet . Author Josephine Tey aka Elizabeth MacKintosh aka Gordon Daviot managed to write a sparkling little mixture between mystery tale and investigative history journalism, first published in 1951: The Daughter of Time , quoting Sir Francis Bacon` s description of Truth.
“Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating form a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a a contemporary portrait of Richard III, which bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history”…”who killed the Little Princes in the Tower”? The story is exciting and enlightening (if like me you have known only Shakespeare’s version of the Wars of the Roses), the approach is novel (Scotland Yard detective turns historian out of bordedom) and I felt stimulated to do some more and deeper reading on English history.

The book is a fine read as a whodunnit, although it takes some energy to keep your course among all those Edwards, Margarets, Elizabeths, Warwicks and Richards (no idea why the Birtish nobility could not choose among a greater variety of names to keep things clear). I spent some very pleasant evenings with this novel.
Recommended reading afterwards (or before): Shakespeare’s Richard III , of course, but also the wonderful historical-romantic Richardian novel “The Sunne in Splendour” by Sharon Kay Penman and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Black Arrow” . A good idea as a preparation before you start: Wikipedias entry on the Wars of the Roses - and do print out that “simplified family tree” of the English royal family that helps a lot indeed.
First rate - A Da Vinci Code “Between the Red Rose and the White”!

RichardIII, Tey, "The, Daughter, of, Time", "Wars, of, the, Roses", mystery, review, book, literature

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For some hours now this photo and some others with similar messages have been spreading across the Flickr photocommunity. People are fighting back!
Without a reason I know about the photocommunity www.flickr.com (owned by Yahoo!) started a censorship measure against users in Germany, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore:
“If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off. In other words that means, that german, singaporian, korean and Honkong users can not access photos on flickr that are not flagged “safe”.

Of course I am vehemently against any kind of censorship by anyone anywhere. Let us support the fight of the Flickr-community! Please blog about this incident and the flickr-users fight against this blatant case of censorship and spread the word!

When any government . . . undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked.

Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On…

“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.” –Abraham Lincoln, from the April 6, 1859 Letter to Henry Pierce

With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.

Star Trek TNG S04E21

flickr, yahoo, www.flickr.com, censorship, hoodwinked, hoodwinking, thinkfllickrthink, censor, againstcensorship, tyranny, oppression, thinkflickrthink,

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