“... he was Jesus, that makes your grandmother the Virgin Mary. And your grandfather was Joseph, the carpenter. Besides, Jesus didn’t have a son to betray him.’‘I wonder if it was actually Brutus he meant. He was a kind of son. Brutus Juliussen. Et tu, Brute? No, I only ate one.’‘You don’t have to say everything that comes into your mind, you ...”

“... to the spot where F. had looked down into the valley with my field glasses. One of our chaps, a carpenter, made two crosses and three stars of David from the sweet-smelling wood of the mountain pine. No names. The CO spoke at some length, first on the ‘no difference of race or creed’ line, then on ‘death to the ...”

“... are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross. He takes this to be the work of Max who, scarcely out of ...”

“... work climbed the ladder to the hide with Belli, a member of the Badaga people who worked as estate carpenter and was a renowned shikari, or huntsman. Robin poked his shotgun out of the same small opening they’d climbed in through, facing the dead bullock, 25 yards away. He’d waited in similar machans several times before for big cats to return to the ...”

“... whom he met in 1930 at J.R. Ackerley’s Hammersmith flat. He notes without dissent Edward Carpenter’s explanation of ‘why I like the Lower Classes. They are not self conscious. I am and therefore need them.’ When things get going with Bob, Forster is able to write: ‘I am happier now than ever in my life, and hope that if anyone reads this book ...”

“... I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after Home and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He’s the ideal author … never says a word!’ In Chariots of Fire he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed John G. in Home felt able to ask his ...”

“... America, but their gratitude was tinged with anxiety. My paternal great-grandfather, a socialist carpenter born in Minsk in 1892, was shaken by the massacre at Kent State University in Ohio in May 1970, where the National Guard killed four students protesting against the Vietnam War. As an adolescent, he had seen workers being shot by tsarist troops during ...”

“... a dizzying subplot, he also involved himself intimately in the quarrel between Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion over the project of a Jewish National Home, and in the attempts by both to play off the British against the Americans. And, though he showed himself able to take risks in leaking classified material that favoured the Zionist cause, he also found ...”