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: …
This piece was commissioned by the ILS as part of the ‘Crossing Borders‘ series.
To Live Outside the Law You Must be Honest
An April bank holiday Monday, and I plan to go across the border somewhere in …
“If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” A definition of terms is the boring, necessary foundation to any philosophical debate, and is equally relevant to appreciating this book. In the title the publishers have chosen …
I was asked to write an Opinion piece for the Observer about reaction to the publication of The Day that Went Missing, including my own reaction to having written a memoir. How does it feel once it’s out there? …
This is a new piece that I wrote for the Guardian family section. It’s based on a photo that gets a mention in The Day That Went Missing, but the book wasn’t the time or place for the full …
What connects the CIA, Somerset’s Midsomer Norton Rugby Football Club and 1970s experimental literature in Paris? Easy. The answer has to be Harry Mathews. At least, it’s easy for me, because I’m the other connection.
The novelist Harry Mathews, the …
