Georgette Heyer might be regarded as a female Denis Wheatley, doubling between historical romances and modern thrillers. If so, she never captured my interest. The Conqueror was the tale of William, 1066 and all that. My copy naturally falls open on page 374 where Harold falls in a very undramatic fashion.
King Harold had fallen at the foot of the standard. Men dropped on their knees beside him. He was quite dead, must have died instantly. An arrow dropping through the dusk had pierced through one eye to the brain.
    The only way this could have happened was if he was standing on his head at the time.
    It was all about half as interesting, less informative and far less visually appealing as reading the Bayeaux Tapestry. I never bothered with Heyer again. But history didn’t have to be the boring stuff they failed to teach us in classes. Sellar and Yeatman, for instance, wrote a scurrilous little book that parodied the whole thing called 1066 and All That. The title, however, was the funniest bit of it, but still we loved its irreverence toward the great personages of our (British) past.

It was probably to his immense delight that Metamorphosis availed himself of these considerably more justifiable reasons to establish very early in the year the tradition of making his first act in any lesson the eviction of my dreadful self from his class.  This he appeared to do without the slightest conscience, and I, slow‑witted perhaps but not insensitive, soon took the hint and ceased to attend Brigg’s classes altogether, and for the rest of the year spent my Tech Drag lessons mooning about in the quadrangle, awaiting in exile for the others and my next class.