For as long as boarding school survivors govern Britain, they will inflict their own pain on the nation.

New Statesman, 12 March 2024

Charles Spencer has a memoir out, and famously, when given a pulpit, Charles Spencer tells it like …

Becoming Prime Minister wasn’t the first significant position Sunak was handed – Winchester College taught him a thing or two about prestige without power, writes Richard Beard

Byline Times, March 2024

Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak was identified by the Conservative …

Richard Beard savours every word

The Nightwatchman, autumn 2023

In 2003, a short book, a very short book, was published by Evergreen Press entitled The Catch. The book’s only reviewer Stephen Moss, in Bodyline Books: Catalogue of Cricket Literature, says …

A prehistoric literary hoax brought to light

Times Literary Supplement, March 2023

Can there ever be enough poets? Evidently not, because more get invented all the time. In the eighteenth century alone, teenager Thomas Chatterton “discovered” the work of the …

By speaking out in his autobiography, Spare, Harry challenges a repressed institution that traduced his grief and demanded his mute compliance.

New Statesman, January 2023

In extracts leaked from his autobiography, Spare, Prince Harry reminds his readers that when his …

Simon Kuper’s book Chums tells the story of how one university taught the core of today’s Brexit government how to achieve power – but not how to use it.

New Statesman, April 2022

Welcome to the “chumocracy”, in England a …

Author Richard Beard, who was sent to an English private school in the same year as Boris Johnson, explores why the politician’s time there explains his destructive approach to leading the country.

Byline Times, December 2021

Before the English private …

Our elite schools foster emotional austerity and fierce clique loyalty. Here a privately educated writer of the prime minister’s generation reveals the lasting damage public schools do.

Guardian, August 2021

I had a feeling I couldn’t immediately place. I wanted …

At the age of fifteen, in 1980, at St Mary’s RC Grammar School in Blackburn, Graham Caveney was sexually abused by his headmaster, Father Kevin O’Neill. Caveney’s subtitled Memoir of an Adolescence starts with this fact, as how could it …

At the age of 60, when he sets out to write this memoir, Allan Jenkins is older than his mother and his brother when they died, ‘time near my end to unravel my beginning.’ At first, the omens aren’t good: …