Diary
In all the endless talk about school examinations I have never heard this important point made. It is that ever improving school exam results are the nearest thing yet to a panacea for universal...
View ArticleOne man and his dog
Six weeks after the defeat of the Taleban Rory Stewart started to walk across Afghanistan. He took the direct route through the central mountains from Herat to Kabul when there was still deep snow on...
View ArticleGods and heroes made human
Nigel Spivey set out to write these stories for his children. He confesses, endearingly, that the children grew up faster than he wrote the book. Perhaps that was as well since the bookshops are...
View ArticlePublic skool monkey business
Listing page content here I misjudged this book. I thought the airport fiction promised by the literary editor would take me nicely to New York, where I was going the next day. However, at 846 pages,...
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Tales out of school
The Old Boys’ Network, by John Rae At Westminster School, under the shadow of Big Ben and at the very centre of national life, 600 of the brightest, quirkiest and most stimulating boys and girls in...
View ArticleSwing, swing together
The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided education of a rapidly improving quality for nothing or next to nothing’, seemed...
View ArticleFull of sound and fury
John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make trouble and disquietness’. Yet this awkward cuss, son...
View ArticleSettling in Seattle
In Waxwings Jonathan Raban triumphantly transfers the skills of an award-winning travel writer to his second novel. (The first was…
View ArticleThe old order changeth
As a historical novel Thomas Gage is more Hardy than Tolstoy. The classic historical novel — as concocted by Walter…
View ArticleDiary
In all the endless talk about school examinations I have never heard this important point made. It is that ever…
View ArticleOne man and his dog
Six weeks after the defeat of the Taleban Rory Stewart started to walk across Afghanistan. He took the direct route…
View ArticleGods and heroes made human
Nigel Spivey set out to write these stories for his children. He confesses, endearingly, that the children grew up faster…
View ArticlePublic skool monkey business
Listing page content here I misjudged this book. I thought the airport fiction promised by the literary editor would take…
View ArticleTales out of school
The Old Boys’ Network, by John Rae At Westminster School, under the shadow of Big Ben and at the very…
View ArticleSwing, swing together
The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided…
View ArticleFull of sound and fury
John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own…
View Article
