The Word of a Gentleman his wife Nora are the focus of many chapters (and the book opens with a quotation from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"); these reflect Niesewand's detention by Desmond Lardner-Burke under P. K. van der Byl and Smith, and his subsequent deportation, leaving behind his wife of three years, Nonie Niesewand (née Fogarty). The Word of a Gentleman The Word of a Gentleman (1981) (later retitled "Undercut") was the third of five novels written by Peter Niesewand, the South African journalist who spent 73 days in solitary confinement for his coverage of Ian Smith's government in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
The Ballad of Chevy Chase and in it the ballad is called "The Hunting of Cheviot", while the first manuscript version of the ballad was written ca. 1550 (MS Ashmole 48, Bodleian Library). In the seventeenth century, the tune was licensed in 1624 and again in 1675. Sir Philip Sidney said of this early ballad: In 1711 Joseph Addison wrote in "The Spectator", The old song of "Chevy-Chase" is the favourite ballad of the common people of England, and Ben Jonson used to say he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works. Sir Philip Sidney, in his discourse of