‘We’re a bad lot,’ Father Edward said. ‘All of us, Jews or Christians. Christians have persecuted Jews, but they’ve persecuted each other just as much. It’s easier to persecute when you can recognize the ones...

Father Edward seemed more at ease here than I was myself. I thought at first that he might have been here before with Siegfried, but his frank, appraising gaze round the walls made that unlikely....

I said to Solly: ‘Where did you turn up from?’ He said: ‘Benno and I enjoy a game of chess together. He wins mostly, but sometimes I run him close.’ They had met, I found,...

I went up to Liverpool occasionally. I had to, since Dadda would not travel down to see me. His meanness, far from relaxing in the post-war years, grew steadily more pronounced. He would not spend...

Poley left us all standing, his commissions frequently equalling, and even excelling, the combined total of the rest. He could win the confidence of a surprising variety of people. I was in the inner office...

I was not angry any longer, and I really was astonished. I had never expected this kind of thing from Siegfried; his very apparent religious devotion had always seemed the ingrowing kind, rather than the...

I was surprised to find, though, that he disapproved of the idea of working on Sundays. He regarded it as offensive towards the country whose guests we were. ‘I can only do it because people...

While she had breakfast, I had coffee; Jinny’s coffee was wonderful. Jinny herself had by this time reached the stage where she was settling into fatness without any regrets; she had always created an atmosphere...

It was impossible to tell whether he was really mad, driven to it by the things that had been done to him, or whether he was feigning madness in the pitiful delusion that he could...

Almost at once I found myself lifted; thin arms and hands held me and raised me on to bony shoulders. I was above them, and all their faces seemed to be turned to me with...