We saw in JTTCOTT he has a copy in his library. Clara read it and found his real name. Saying to 11 "You have a name it's .".
How did she know the man described in the book was the same man who later refers to himself as just the "doctor" ?.
Seems a bit lapse of him to leave that kind of information lying around. Anyone could find ,steal and use it against him.
There have been times he doesn't even remember to shut or lock the tardis door!. I get why he would have it just keep it in a safer place. Why not lock it in a drawer or have it in his bedroom ?. Timelords do need to sleep right ?..

Presumably, because he was mentioned in the book! By the time of the Time War, he had already been called The Doctor for centuries, remember.

Not much. And he may not have much need to secure rooms, after all the TARDIS should be more than capable of reconfiguring the layout to keep people out if it wants to. Perhaps it wanted Clara to read the book?

More interestingly, who wrote it?

And why was it written in English?

Its not necessarily in English - the TARDIS translation works for written words too. Except where its a really, really old language like the hieroglyphs in "The Satan Pit".

Except that River says that that TARDIS doesn't/can't/won't translate Gallifreyan, in A Good Man Goes To War. On the other hand, there seems to be a few variants of Gallifreyan, some ancient, some more recent, so maybe only certain dialects are untranslatable.

Well there is a saying that the histories of wars are always written by the winners.
In the Time War there was no "winner", so perhaps it was actually the Daleks who ended up writing it!

It could have been written by many of the races that bore witness to the time war.

Maybe it was written by the krikitmen and the TARDIS automatically translated it to a language Clara could read

I wish when people started with a breakdown of the title into letters that first they typed in Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis, before they started to abbreviate it to JTTCOTT

Isn't that a bit like having the definitive gude to the Second World War written by a Neanderthal?

As the only surviving participant of The Time War, the Doctor must be the only person able to write the "History of the Time War" - I can't see the Dalek's being big on the written word.

So why didn't he write it in Gallifreyan (which the TARDIS doesn't translate) or at the very least, leave his name out of it?

They do say confession is good for the soul. Maybe he wrote it to remember and just in case someone needed to read it.

The TARDIS library contains a copy of every book ever written. So that history could be millennia in the future, written by someone who had been told the story personally by anyone, possibly a finally, actually dying Doctor. And therefore it could be in any language at all. With time travel and its trappings, it needn't have been written by the Doctor, at all.

The winner was "the Time Lord Victorious," so that brings us back to the Doctor writing it...

Wow, talk about spoliers...

That suggests its always been in the library. What if 8 - 8.5 read it and that's why he stole "The Moment" and used it to end the Time War?

Timey-Wimey, indeed.

The Doctor is more than just a Timelord. He is a super-duper Shazbot Timelord.

As the TARDIS can control it's own layout and effectively hide parts of itself, maybe she never let previous Doctors see it to protect them. The TARDIS would always know the time war and the Doctors actions were going to happen as it's been said she perceives all of time and space at the same time, past, present and possible futures.

I don't know if it's just me but i've always loved the idea of the TARDIS being a living thing with a personality (and the glimpses of her personality we've seen have been amazing if short), following that it would be great if the TARDIS had effectively hidden events from the Doctor considering the Book would potentially contain future events for the Doctor.

Especially if he's going back to the Time War (spec) MAJOR spoilers for him if so.

A room in the TARDIS the Doctor isn't allowed to go into until after the Day of the Doctor and from his perspective the Time War is finally over, and it's just books and video, documentaries showing the Doctor the (good?) effects his actions in the time war had on the universe and that lets him move on completely and accept his actions, because he can finally see the good he did instead of focusing on the guilt.

The TARDIS trying to comfort and help her Doctor.

The Daleks are more or less the winners of the Time War because their Empire has been restored as seen in Asylum of the Daleks and now that they have no memory of The Doctor it may make them more dangerous than ever.

I'm not sure she sees all possible futures. Practically anything is possible so that would be pretty meaningless!

I reckon the Time War altered time so that the book didn't even exist in the future until that future was created by the Time War itself. So the book would not have been in the library until the Time War happened regardless of what time period it actually was written in!

I may be showing how much of a nerd I am but I think Rivers line was along the lines of "the Tardis doesnt/cant translate old high Gallifreyan" so maybe the book was in Gallifreyan but not "old high Gallifreyan" hence the reason that the Tardis could translate it for Clara.

I cant remember exactly but I think that was the same thing when the Doctor took Amy to the oldest cliff face in the universe that River had defaced by using old high Gallifreyan writing so the Doctor had to translate it for her.

It's His Story.

(in my own opinion and what I took away from the episode)
I think that the idea of the ending of the episode was that without memory of the Doctor, The Daleks were actually (somehow) less dangerous.

The Daleks have admitted that fighting against The Doctor has made them grow stronger by having defeat after defeat handed to them by the Doctor which in turn made them evolve into a much stronger and more dangerous race from what they originally were created as being. (which in part is actually true)

By taking away their greatest threat, "the predator of the Daleks" The doctor is gambling that whilst this makes the Daleks (at least in their own mind) at the top of the "galactic food chain" but they will also become stangnant/complacement which allows them to make errors and as a part of that makes them easier to defeat.

At least thats what I think anyway, probably missed the point.

I still think it will be relevant in upcoming stories. The "One moment" mentioned in the trailer I think is talking about The Moment used to end the Time War.

That conjured up a weird image of a Dalek sitting quietly at a desk with a only dim lamp and bits of paper on it...

Surely the most obvious writer of the book would be the archaeologist expert who's devoted her lives to studying and knowing the Doctor

In honesty though, I think the Tardis would know that Clara might need this information. That's why it would translate it, and let her find it.

Has that been stated on the show?


If so you would wonder why the Doctor was so impressed with the Library Planet (and visited it on occasion).


"Whole Planet converted into a Library containing every book up to the 51st Century? Pah that's nothing!"

Why are other races the equivalent of Neanderthals?

I would have thought it more akin to a Swiss historian writing a book on the definitive history of World War II.

Just because a neutral party may have written it it does not lead that they have to be significantly inferior to the time lords or the daleks