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 it is. His new book, A Very Private School, is about his experience in the […]

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 Party as the safest available pair of hands. He was a Prime Minister who could […]

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 it took him about a minute and a half to read. I’m not sure what […]

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 fifteenth-century monk Thomas Rowley, while James MacPherson “translated” – to great acclaim – an epic […]

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 mother was killed in a car crash he was in a different country and only […]

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 modern word but an ancient notion. Early in the 19th century the radical pamphleteer William […]

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 education system turned him into ‘Boris’, Alexander Johnson attended the European School in Brussels. My […]

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 to go out but wasn’t allowed. Shelves were emptying at the nearest supermarket and instead […]

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 not? The trauma is ‘something that the survivor, the sufferer, carries within them; the wreckage […]

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: all he sees are memories that ‘stir like crocodiles.’ In this particular family, the past […]