Richard Cobb: A Classical Education

martin flanagan : the empty honour board: a school memoir

This book is about describing my schooldays and their impact on my adult life.

When he was ten years old, in 1966, Martin Flanagan was sent to a Catholic boy’s boarding school in Tasmania. Of the twelve priests on the staff, three have since gone to prison for sexual crimes committed against boys in their care. In this book, which is also a memoir of his childhood and family life, Flanagan takes a balanced and compassionate look at life in a boy’s boarding school.

Stately houses, goff and pterodactyls’ hooves

Imagine, for a minute, that you’re a schoolgirl in an English boarding school in the 1950’s.  You’re out walking in the woods and you run into an escapee from the Broadmoor Psychiatric hospital ten miles away.  What do you do?

A Private Place – Amanda Craig

I once read a description of the great British Public Schools (a strange term; they are not for the general public but are fee paying schools for the elite) as ‘concentration camps run by paedophiles.’ How my heart would sink when I was reading an English novel and the son reached the age of seven. I knew the mother would be distraught, the father resolute; the child, like his father before him, had to be sent away to boarding school. Whether it was Eton, Rugby or Harrow, the poor innocent had no idea what he was in for.