Newgate Prison

Sir Thomas Malory is not much of a knight. He lies; he is lecherous; he is bested in tourneys; he misses battles due to a dicky stomach; he inadvertently causes the deaths of his friends. He is no Sir Lancelot. But he has his talents, chief among them being his ability to spin a yarn, and he has won much renown for his retelling of the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table, later to be published as Le Morte d’Arthur. Now he has the chance to set his own story straight. Well, straight-ish. A Good Deliverance is a sly and salty fictional account of the life and deeds

To come across dates and names carved into a choirstall or ancient tree is to experience a momentary frisson, a startled connection with the past. Yet this practice of making ‘unauthorised’ personal graphic statements in public spaces is often thought of as antisocial, something to be erased immediately. Unless of course they are by Banksy, whose spray-painted outpourings cost local councils a great deal to clean off before they came to be regarded as valid documents, articulating the thoughts and imaginings of the disaffected. In her ingenious new book Writing on the Wall, the art historian Madeleine Pelling has chosen to use these often transitory pieces of historical evidence as