Reviews of Test Dept, Madli Marje Gildemann, and Heinz Holliger and Marie-Lise Schupbach
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Pernicious perils of privilege
ANDY HEDGECOCK recommends a book exposing how public schools exacerbate inequality in Britain
JOHN GREEN appreciates an informative and readable account of the nation state and its current dilemmas, but doubts the solutions this author has to offer
JOHN MCINALLY recommends that this rational, reasonable and devastating case against the End Of Life Bill be read by every serious socialist activist
CHRIS SEARLE urges you not to miss Mark Sanders’ three night residency at Cafe Oto, Dalston, London
JENNY MITCHELL surveys the work of Hurvin Anderson, now a centrepiece of Britain’s white-dominated art establishment, and explores some of the complexities it opens up about British Caribbean identity
SOPHIE STOLL wallows in a fine live recording of old blues-infused folk songs immersed in American blue-collar culture
ANGUS REID and MARIA DUARTE review DJ Ahmet, Redoubt, They Will Kill You, and The Magic Faraway Tree
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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