To get annoyed by a badly written novel with serious factual mistakes

[PhaedraIsMyName]

Author thinks the witness to a crime can decide who the Crown calls as expert witness.

Expert witness is a therapist who was treating the witness to the crime. Expert witness is married to a lawyer. Expert witness has been discussing the background with lawyer husband. The person accused of the crime is the crime scene witness'father. Author thinks the lawyer husband can represent the accused and this is not a conflict.

Lawyer husband is actually employed in a government legal department and author thinks lawyer husband can, whilst still employed, act as a defence lawyer.

It's tosh. Did nobody bother to edit or proof read it?

Is it just me who bothers about stuff like this?

I got very upset at one (otherwise excellent) short story that had a person in ancient Rome use soap. It's the odd things that can throw you out of a story, so I understand absolutely!

Hmm, I may actually mean quantitative data accessible by instruments, rather than strictly anything to do with numbers.

Actually what I think I mean is the act of measurement, to generate data that is descriptive of the messy reality. And the way this quantitative data is used in the modern scientific method: data trumps theory, not the other way round.

Whereas in the book you're reading, it sounds like the numbers are prescriptive. They are all about what "should" happen in god's perfectly ordained (and numerologically designed) world.

Actually, measurement as a means of understanding god's creation, all the better to glorify him, becomes a big theme in the C18th. Which is why we have all that marvellous meteorological data, and thicknesses of bird's eggs, from diligent clergymen going up the same hill at the same time every day and measuring windspeed or whatever.

This thread is quite therapeutic.

I like crime fiction but can't stand Elizabeth George - an American who writes books set in the UK with some supposed titled aristocrat working for Scotland Yard. She gets SO much stuff about England wrong. Why does she bother? Why not just set it in Chicago if you can't be bothered to find out simple facts?

Some crime writers have a love of inserting a newspaper story in the text, an update on the case or whatever. They never stop and think about how to write journalism and especially news. Never occurs to them that newspapers don't write vague, generic intros with tedious detail instead of the meaty stuff. Do they not read the news?

Oooh I love this thread.

Any novels about Tudor England invariably annoy me with their modern opinions and thought processes. Remember hurling one to the wall which had Lady Jane Grey stropping about huffing like a petulant teenager. Now I know she wasn't a fan of getting married but still! In the novel she was nearly slamming doors and eye-rolling.

My Mum is always annoyed by Alan Rickman having the name of 'George' as Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. Not sure when the name was first used in England, but if it was with King George I they're a good 400-500 years out! Although admittedly if you're looking for historical accuracy, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves is probably not the place you'd go to first...

Oh, I'm with you. But no, I think it's more the idea that if you have too many contractions after the waters break, you have a fair idea the labour is in trouble. I think they were pretty practical.

I'm realizing writing this, I am actually irritated by the opposite thing - by people (like in the White Queen!) being all woo-magic and vague as a nod to 'old-timey superstition'. Which is not what you are suggesting either, I know! But I would love for once to see descriptions of childbirth that do not contain either bizarredly modern techniques or:

1. a calming draft of mysterious herbs that made the pain go away (erm, if they worked that well, we'd still be using them!)

2. a wise woman making strange cross-shapes over the labouring woman's body.

3. The complete absence of a third stage.

meadow - dunno when George came in, but it's a pretty common fifteenth century name (just off the top of my head). St George is around well before that.

I think the most annoying thing is when they're describing someone in hospital and their heart goes into asystole (flatline) yet they still shock them. It doesn't work.

I was just about to mention St George too

sashh I just meant that NI didn't exist as any sort of recognisable 'place' in that era. Ulster did though, obviously. And yes, the Ulster plantations were in the Elizabethan era, if I recall correctly.

But honestly, it was just a bit of banter in keeping with the spirit of the thread , I didn't mean to sound arsey.

Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves not accurate?!

I thought in 13th century Sherwood Forest it was perfectly plausible for a mysterious foreigner to carry out a c section with no anaesthetic and all the mother does is groan a bit. And then she gets up and recovers!

I'm devastated that it's not historically accurate, devastated.

I adore Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.

It's right up there with Braveheart.

"Although admittedly if you're looking for historical accuracy, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves is probably not the place you'd go to first..."

Or geographical accuracy for that matter. The white cliffs of Dover being a few hours walk from Hadrian's Wall, which is apparently close enough to Nottingham for them to be there 'by nightfall'

What pisses me off in historical dramas is when women give birth on their backs. It just wasn't done, except in exceptional circumstances like the woman being unconscious or v ill or something. Women always laboured standing up, or on all fours, from the lowliest peasant to the richest queens. The first recorded example of a woman giving birth on her back was at the court of Louis XIV, if I remember rightly, so he could watch, and in the UK, it only became a sympathetic trend amongst the upper classes when George III's wife, Charlotte, had to give birth to some of their many children lying down due to health issues, so we're talking the early 19C.

I have also still not recovered from my annoyance at Daphne giving birth on a riverbank whilst wearing bottle green tights, in Neighbours in the 80s.

I banned one of the DDs' picture books because it showed polar bears and penguins together. Honestly.

Loving this thread. Agree re: The Da Vinci Code - I just couldn't carry on reading it.

The most hilariously wrong thing on TV was Bone Kickers - anyone remember that? Guardian review. Knew we were in for a treat from the start when the archaeologist knelt down to whisper Give up your secrets at the dig site.

This thread is my spiritual home!

Did anyone see Made in Dagenham. The dialogue! My favourite bit was when the main character tells her husband to "have a nice day." Americanisms such as "have a nice day" were laughable to the English right into the 1980s, no one ever said that then!

Someone upthread said about the use of "pregnant" in historical fiction. I agree wholeheartedly. When I was a child no one ever said pregnant and I am not even 50. We said someone was "expecting a baby" or "expecting" for short. "Pregnant" was a word that was slightly shockingly over-explicit, a medical term perhaps; a woman announcing that she was pregnant would have been seen a bit like a woman today saying "I am going to urinate" when she is off to the loo, ok, it's accurate but there are plenty of nice euphemisms so please use one of those.

One of my big bugbears is my beloved Jilly Cooper.

• She has Lysander naming his dog after Maggie Tulliver after only getting to page 4 of The Mill on the Floss - Maggie Tulliver has not yet put in an appearance by page 4.

• She has someone living in America driving as "absolutely filthy mini" and eating sausage rolls at a buffet. Maybe I am wrong but I don't think Americans go in for sausage rolls much . . .

• The worst was someone neglects their chip pan and it catches fire. Her life is saved by her bf chucking a bucket of water on it. Except if you pour water on a chip pan fire it actually explodes.

Robin Hood Prince of Thieves is one of my guilty pleasures. Alan Rickman chewing the scenery is a performance for the ages.

When I first saw it, I though Azeem just reached in and turned the baby. On a multitude a few subsequent viewings, I realized that he asked for needle and thread so did a C-section.

Like milk upthread, I have been disappointed by the number of my dd's childrens books that feature hippos, lions and tigers living happily together in the jungle

Also i am a scientist trained in biology/medicine/genetics married to a man who likes to watch science fiction films. I have given up cursing while watching them, he only laughs at me

But what really pisses me off is authors who make mistakes about their own books - Years ago I read Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, and while I could happily suspend reality and read about the heroine Ayla going hunting onagers with her pet cave lion in book 2, I couldn't forgive her for the bit in book 4 when Ayla 'had never seen onagers before'. Grrrr

This thread is amazing.

I'm still upset about a book I read 17 or so years ago where characters in C13th Europe were eating kiwifruit. I don't think they'd even have had Chinese Gooseberries back then.

We bought a book for my 1-year-old nephew called That's Not My Monkey and in the end couldn't give it to him because there were mostly apes not monkeys in the book.

Ooh, desperately mentally running through my novel to try to spot any historical howlers or plot inconsistencies.

I'd already concluded that my fictional city's dead-body recovery service was ludicrously over-manned, but DH and I have agreed that that's due to the politicians of said fictional city constantly increasing the budget for dead-body recovery as a vote-winner.

No-one goes to the loo at any point, though. I'm very tempted to add that in in Chapter 2!

Yes, penguins and polar bears!

We were watching The Snowman last Christmas, and there's a scene where they fly over a penguin on the way to the north pole. Extremely unlikely, unless said penguin had escaped from a zoo....

Oooh, ooh, love bad science - one of the star trek films where they end up in 20th century America with Chekov asking passers by where the nearest "nuclear wessel" is, so they can collect photons to fix the engines. And the Day after Tomorrow, which has the Gulf Stream (strictly speaking, the Atlantic Meridional Circulation) going the wrong way, and has temperatures dropping so fast they're going to end up below absolute zero.

Also, picking up on the football theme earlier - the Tom Clancy novel which has Man U v. Celtic in a league match (the fact that it is a league match is actually specified - they could have made it a friendly, or a Champions' League tie, but no...)

Love, love, love Robin Hood Prince of Thieves though - it's Kevin Costner obviously thinking he's making a serious historical drama while everyone around him shamelessly takes the piss that makes the film for me!

GrouchyKiwi, I made myself unpopular at a baby sing & rhyme time, when my son was younger, and the leader used to use a chimpanzee puppet when singing 'Five Little Monkeys', and I pointed out to her that chimps are not monkeys.

Much as it pains me to say it, given my screen name, but Hercule Poirot joined the Belgian police in the 1890's and was in his forties when he solved his first case in England ( The Mysterious Affair at Styles) in 1916. So by the time he solves the Third Girl murder in the 1960's he is over 90.