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To publish or not to publish? This has been the question at the heart of two stories this week that shine an uncomfortable light upon attitudes of the past. Should The Sun have published images of the Royal Family doing a Nazi salute? Should Harper Lee have published Go set a Watchman, revealing its hero, Atticus Finch to be a racist and not quite the champion of liberal values he was presented as in To Kill a Mockingbird? Sympathy for the Queen, who cannot easily comment herself, might lead us to feel that raking up this deeply difficult period in her family history was gratuitous; whilst those arguing that Watchman should not have been published point to its inferior literary qualities and the detrimental effect it has on the perfection of Mockingbird. As ever, though, whether or not we think something should be published depends on who we are, and on which side of history we fall. Whilst many who were once inspired by this tale of a white lawyer who defends an innocent black man may now be mourning a lost hero, there are plenty of African Americans for whom this novel never really told their truth or rang true; as for those of us re-reading it now, perhaps we will be more sensitized to the perspectives and fates of the black people in it and the deep conservatism that also dismisses the white poor as being beyond help. When our heroes are under attack it can be tempting to rush to their defence – the Queen was just a child; in 1933 the salute was not offensive; this was all before Hitler was known to be a monster – and yet so often history is more complex than memory allows – by the time this film was being shot Hitler was already legislating against Jews, and the truth is that anti-Semitism was part of the fabric of pre-war Britain. Our memories, personal and corporate, can play tricks on us, reading our sympathies back into other historical periods, projecting the best of ourselves onto our heroes, and distancing us from attitudes we now find abhorrent. When our heroes turn out to be more complex we can feel betrayed and want to turn away. But the danger of one-sided heroes – whoever they are - is that they can keep us from seeing the planks in our own eyes; planks that blind us to the accepted prejudices of our own time; prejudices that lurk, ready to be harnessed against those already disadvantaged. More rounded heroes, whose stories we tell warts and all, like many of those unlikely saints in the Christian canon, are perhaps more powerful in in helping us to become realistic moral agents: people who, in the words of Isaac Watts’ hymn ‘wrestled hard - as we do now - with sins and doubts and fears.’ Perhaps most powerful of all in helping us identify and repent of our current prejudices might be heroes who have made a journey - who may, as a child, have been taught a Nazi salute - but who 80 years on have stooped in Bergen-Belsen and laid flowers on a mass grave.