Ripon is one of England's smallest cities, and has a long history that encompasses saints, actors, marquesses, mayors, murderers, writers and eccentrics. Its Hornblower sets the watch each evening in a tradition said to be more than a thousand years old and each year festivities celebrate the return from exile of St Wilfrid in AD 705. Its nineteenth-century workhouse is the most complete one still surviving today, and in the First World War the city...