Books: Once Upon a Time

THE SARACEN'S HEAD (68 pp.)—Osbert Lancaster—Houghton M/ffl/n ($2).

Frail, timid William de Littlehampton was born in the wrong century and spent a lot of his time wishing he hadn't been born at all. Richard the Lion Heart was England's dashing monarch and knighthood was in flower; but at 20, Willie sat his horse like a sack of meal, rattled in his 12th Century armor like an ill-packed skeleton and couldn't get out of the way of his own lance and sword.

To make matters worse, his dead father, famed Sir Dagobert, had always been a very model of knighthood, had throttled a hawk...