SAD LITTLE MEN
PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND THE RUIN OF ENGLAND RICHARD BEARD
Harvill Secker, 288pp, £16.99 Richard Beard has written a bitterly passionate denunciation of private boarding schools and their effect on the boys who are sent to them and the men they become. He was one of these schoolboys himself (prep school at Pinewood and then Radley) and, now 53, believes that the experience of being sent away has damaged him (and others like him, including those in government) beyond repair. Nicola Shulman in the Times Literary
Supplement was dazzled by Beard’s writing: ‘it’s really good, clever, dazzling in its anger and the force of its argument’.
Nicholas Lezard in the Spectator was also impressed. ‘I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this,’ he wrote, ‘one of the finest polemics I have ever come across.’ Beard looks at the twisted children now running the country (‘he pays special attention to the Prime Minister and his predecessor but one’) and finds that boarding schools have much to answer for.
In the Times, however, David James found Beard’s argument was too politically motivated to hold up. Does he think that ‘because he went to the same type of school as Johnson and Cameron he knows how and why they behave as they do? Why does he not make the same claim for other old Etonians such as Justin Welby or Eddie Redmayne?’ And his ‘obsession with Radley borders on the unbalanced: why, of all places, return there? Why revisit it “three or four times a week”, walking among its locked-down, empty classrooms?’ James was perplexed by a ‘strange, self-indulgent primal scream of a book’.
Beard’s ‘obsession with Radley borders on the unbalanced’