Jeremy Lewis

Glittering Entries

Going Up: To Cambridge and Beyond – A Writer’s Memoir

By

Robson Press 413pp £25 order from our bookshop

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

Follow Literary Review on Twitter