I've heard A Tale of Two Cities described as a 'poor attempt at an historical novel,' but I agree it was a great book and one of my personal favorites. I remember trying to read Dickens as a kid and failing, then trying again in my youth and absolutely devouring everything he had written. David Copperfield is still my favorite novel ever, while Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities wouldn't be very far behind. Also enjoined Hard Times, Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby, in particular.
Re Schindler's List, just how close to non-fiction the story was remains questionable. This from the Guardian some years ago (also published in the NY Times and elsewhere):
As a Nazi party member credited with saving more than 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust, Oskar Schindler was nothing if not a complex personality. But newly unearthed evidence suggests that he may have been far more complicated - and rather less heroic - than the character immortalised in the Steven Spielberg movie Schindler's List.
According to a new biography of the German industrialist, there was no Schindler's list, the legendary document containing names of Jewish employees at his Polish factory who were designated as "essential workers" and thus spared from the concentration camps.
In fact, Schindler was in jail at the time, and others compiled the lists, according to David Crowe, a North Carolina history professor affiliated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/ ... rmany.film
