Early on in what is, I hope, the first instalment of his autobiography, Frederic Raphael describes how, as a schoolboy at Charterhouse, he disqualified himself from sitting for a closed scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. A visiting clergyman, preaching in the school chapel, asked the congregation to imagine the young Jesus, trained as a carpenter, trying to sell his work to a shopkeeper in Nazareth – who, ‘being a Jew, would give him as little for it as possible’. Rather than storm out of the chapel, banging the door behind him, Raphael wrote to the visiting cleric; his letter was forwarded to the headmaster, who decided that

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