There are a few biographical details about Professor Robert Wistrich that people tend to overlook when evaluating the work of someone who is arguably the world’s foremost authority on antisemitism.

It is a story which out-Dan-Browns Dan Brown, a tale of Italian mediaeval courts, spies, intrigue, and, at its heart, an extraordinary Jewish scholar, Abraham Ben Mordecai Farissol.

The hidden area between a municipal car park and two alleyways off a bustling Plymouth street may seem a peculiar location for the oldest functioning Ashkenazi synagogue in the English-speaking world.

Indeed, many British Jews do not know of the existence of the magnificent, ornate, Grade II listed Plymouth Synagogue that is currently celebrating its 250th anniversary.

The story of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park who secretly intercepted German military communications during World War Two has been justly celebrated in recent years.

But later this year a TV company hopes to reveal details about another covert British intelligence operation which helped the war effort.

An illustration of a historic East End synagogue is set to earn £20,000 for its restoration fund.

Illustrator Lucinda Rogers - who has worked for newspapers including the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph - produced the orange, red and pink image of Sandys Row Synagogue last year.

"I wanted her to record the moment just before the synagogue went for its £500,000 restoration," Sandys Row boa

Pistols were firing, children were being dragged from their mothers, and men stampeded in panic. But this was not a German concentration camp. It was the sinking of the Titanic, as witnessed by a British Jewish survivor.

One hundred years ago, survivor Joseph Hyman told the New York Herald: "We sat there silent, we were terror-stricken.