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Re-releases from Andy Cohen + Eleanor Ellis + William Lee Ellis, Leon Russell with Mary Russell, and Johnny Winter
Pernicious perils of privilege
ANDY HEDGECOCK recommends a book exposing how public schools exacerbate inequality in Britain
MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
MARTIN HALL examines the way the Roman orator took on different schools of philosophy
ALEX HALL is amused at the way the UFOs appear exactly where commercial interests, conspiracies, militarism and right-wing media overlap
ANDY HEDGECOCK is astonished by a portrait of contemporary Greece, complete with political protest, organised crime and people trafficking, told from the point of view of — wait for it — runaway poultry
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Eagles Of The Republic, The Balloonists, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War
Posh Boys: How the English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
(Oneworld, £16.99)
POSH Boys highlights the pernicious influence of public schools on social division in Britain. But it’s a book with a split personality. Robert Verkaik’s painstaking historical analysis of the rise and maintenance of public school power leads to policy proposals more radical than any seriously contemplated by British governments but there are irritating lapses into superficiality.
The first third of the book traces the history of public schools from the late medieval era, when they were established by the Church to educate the poor, through their reinvention as chartered institutions after the Reformation and into the imperialist 19th century, when they became hothouses of “muscular Christianity.”
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