Robin Hirsch: Hello, my name is Robin Hirsch. The last name, Hirsch, is a German Jewish name; my parents were born in Berlin at the turn of the last century and when Hitler came to power, they escaped miraculously to England, just in time to be bombed by their former countrymen.

In England, they were Jewish refugees, but they were also German nationals, so they were suspects. And my father was, in fact, interned in the equivalent of a concentration camp on the Isle of Man. He spent the rest of the war, after 1940, on the roof of our block of flats, looking and listening for the planes of his former countryman. They cast around for a suitable English name to call their first-born son who was born during the war, and the woman in the next bed to my mother, suggested Robin. This is indeed a very English name, but my parents had a really hard time pronouncing it, so I tended to be called inaudible.