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The price of private education

Posted on April 15, 2024January 27, 2025 by 3nxctRqvn28

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 …

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Rishi Sunak’s Head Boy Energy

Posted on March 15, 2024January 27, 2025 by 3nxctRqvn28

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 …

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Catch Me If You Can

Posted on November 15, 2023January 27, 2025 by 3nxctRqvn28

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 …

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The writing on the wall

Posted on March 15, 2023January 27, 2025 by 3nxctRqvn28

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 …

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Prince Harry has broken the royals’ infantilising code of silence. It’s about time

Posted on January 15, 2023January 27, 2025 by 3nxctRqvn28

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 …

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The born-to-rule Oxford Tories

Posted on April 15, 2022January 27, 2025 by 3nxctRqvn28

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 …

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Settling Scores: The Private School Prime Minister Takes his Revenge

Posted on December 15, 2021January 27, 2025 by 3nxctRqvn28

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 …

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Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country

Posted on August 15, 2021January 27, 2025 by 3nxctRqvn28

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 …

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Book Review – The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness

Posted on August 13, 2017April 15, 2024 by 3nxctRqvn28
Richard Beard, writer, author, novelist, Sad Little Men, The Day That Went Missing, Acts of the Assassins, Becoming Drusilla, Manly Pursuits, UK

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 …

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Book Review – Plot 29, by Allan Jenkins

Posted on June 13, 2017April 15, 2024 by 3nxctRqvn28
Richard Beard, writer, author, novelist, Sad Little Men, The Day That Went Missing, Acts of the Assassins, Becoming Drusilla, Manly Pursuits, UK

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: …

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Winner PEN Ackerley Prize 2018,​ Finalist NBCC Award 2018, Shortlisted Rathbones Folio Prize 2018 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018


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  • Introduction
  • About
  • Books
  • Other writing
  • Interviews
  • Contact