He survived his birth, a sickly childhood and a famine to become, 25 years later, a judge in the Uganda High Court.A spokeswoman for the Archbishop said yesterday that Dr Sentamu had been "deluged" with e-mails offering support and urging him to ignore the racist abuse. Returning to Flanders in 1918 he was wounded again - mistakenly, by one of his own troops - and went back to Blighty for good.The war had presented Sassoon with a mental dilemma - how to reconcile his terror of the trenches with an urge to "prove himself". Post-Armistice, he was caught in an aesthetic trap: the difficulty, now the guns had fallen silent, of finding a subject. Why couldn't he create something, he wondered irritably in 1921? The question clanged on endlessly for four-and-a-half decades.
His entire post-Great War life, Egremont implies, was a struggle to fit in, to square his temperament (passive, reflective, "English" in a practically antediluvian sense) and his sexuality with a world and a literary climate that he regarded with deep mistrust.Nowhere was the strain of accommodating these different sides of his nature more apparent than in his relationship, begun in the mid-1920s, with Stephen Tennant. Egremont's account of the six-year affair between the craggy war veteran of fixed tastes and humours and this effeminate ornament of the Mayfair drawing rooms ("You despicable pieces of filth," a woman once shouted, seeing them together in the street) is perhaps the best thing in the book.It shows on the one hand the passionate attraction between the two ("I ask only to be near him always," Sassoon once wrote) and on the other the hulking temperamental fractures - Sassoon's disapproval of Tennant's flibbertigibbet friends, "Steenie"'s habitual flightiness - that would eventually drive them apart. In the end, the narcissistic and consumptive Tennant seems to have decided that having "Sieg" on the premises, where he antagonised the nursing staff and barred the door to callers, was making him worse.Meanwhile, the poems had given way to the two autobiographical prose sequences begun in 1928 with Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man - commercially successful, but progressively more staid and, the critics pronounced, disconnected from the pulse of interwar Europe. He recalled how four young white men spat at him and said: "Nigger, go back." He replied: "You have wasted your saliva."In his interview yesterday he said: "This country, of all the places I have been to, is the most tolerant and welcoming of all places. Therefore, this tiny minority is not going to stop me from telling people that if we become a society of friends and a society that will discover the wonderful love of God and Christ, we have a chance of leading the nation in prayer."When Mr Sentamu was born, the sixth of 13 children, near Kampala in Uganda in 1949, he was so small the local bishop was called in to baptise him immediately. What upset him most was the sudden change in the officers' behaviour when they realised his identity.He said at the time: "When they discovered who I was, the way I was treated was very different. They should treat everybody with respect, with dignity."He has also been the victim of verbal and physical abuse.
I don't want to have those sorts of things, and I say, 'Why do people do this?'" But he told BBC Radio 4's Today : "In the end, when I get those letters, I actually pray for the person who's written them."The new Archbishop of York, the second highest position in the Church of England, was educated in Uganda, where he practised as a barrister and was an outspoken critic of Idi Amin's regime, before coming to the UK in 1974.He was ordained in 1979 and, after serving in a succession of London parishes, he was appointed Bishop of Stepney in 1996, and Bishop of Birmingham in 2002. All his life he has campaigned against racism and other forms of discrimination.Dr Sentamu worked on inquiries into the 1993 racist killing of Stephen Lawrence and the stabbing in 2000 of the Nigerian schoolboy Damilola Taylor, and has said the Church of England contains institutional racism, just as a room full of smokers contains smoke.During his six years as Bishop of Stepney, east London, he was stopped and searched eight times by the police. They simply tell you, I am Mr White X and nigger go back and this is what you are like, this is what you are worth." Dr Sentamu, 56, said it did not mean Britain was a racist country, and he believed the letter-writers represented a "tiny minority" The archbishop said: "It has been terrible. Some of it has been awful."Asked if he felt angry, he said: "Yes, particularly when they had human excrement in them.
