Memoir borrowed from Brainyquote.com

PRINCE HARRY’S memoir begins with a literary quote from the celebrated American author William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

It lends an air of literary respectability to the memoir, yet just a few pages later, the Duke admits that he found the line on the website Brainyquote.com.

The Duke of Sussex was so taken by Faulkner’s turn of phrase, he writes that he was “thunderstrick”. His first thought was “Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?”

The quote comes from Faulkner’s 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, which tells of a Mississippi woman whose infant child is murdered by her nanny. In the novel, she struggles with her past in which she was violently sexually assaulted and forced into prostitution

The author, a leading light of the so-called Southern Rennaisance, was a noted apologist for slavery who once declared that he longed for the return of the “benevolent autocracy” of slavery, in which “negroes would be better off because they’d have someone to look after them”. Faulkner also opposed the forced ending of segregation in the South, saying that if it came to it, he’d “fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting negroes”.

Despite his political views, Faulkner’s works are celebrated for bringing the tragic tradition into the modern world.