From the condemned slums of Southam Street in West London to the corridors of power in Westminster, Alan Johnson's multi-award-winning autobiography charts an extraordinary journey, almost unimaginable in today's Britain.
The narrow street on which Harry Bernstein grew up was seemingly unremarkable; there was nothing to distinguish it from the hundreds of other such working class streets in the industrial north of England - save for an invisible wall down the middle, dividing Jews on one side, from Christians on the other.
