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.

[[{"type":"media","fid":"8313","view_mode":"inlineright","instance_fields":"override","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":""}]]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.”

There is an interesting aside from this period — the assertion that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is twaddle. The Duke of Wellington hated his short time at the school, which had no playing fields in his day.