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Now only a handful of men in the village are still practicing the art of fitting miniature horseshoes to eggshells, including 69-year-old Stjepan Biletic who trained to do so when he retired from schoolteaching after the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Note, please, how he insults Molesley on the eve of the footman’s new schoolteaching career: “There are plenty of little boys who want to be famous cricketers. It’s not enough to make them champions.”

“The only professional jobs ... open to blacks were ... pastoring a black church and schoolteaching, which was open because of segregated schools,” recalled the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the minister of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery during the 1950s.

The health and schoolteaching budgets have been protected, but only in nominal terms: the NHS must still treat more people with less money.

She writes of the difficulties of a childhood home in which these impulses were not recognised, let alone respected, and of her years spent in the halfway-house of schoolteaching, where her life as a woman and her life as an intellectual were held in a tepid kind of deadlock.