Cyril Bonhamy & The Great Drain Robbery

Children's Books

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy

Literature & Fiction

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Jane's Adventures on the Island of Peeg (Piccolo Books)

Macmillan

The public schools of England have long been praised and reviled in equal measure. Do they perpetuate elites and unjust divisions of social class? Do they improve or corrupt young minds and bodies? Should they be abolished? Are they in fact the form of education we would all wish for our children if we could only afford the fees?  Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's classic study of Britain's 'independent sector' of schools first appeared in 1977 and still stands as the most widely admired history of the subject, ranging across 1400 years in its spirited investigation. Provocative and comprehensive, witty and revealing, it traces the arc by which schools that were, circa 1900, typically 'frenziedly repressive about sex, odiously class-conscious and shut off into tight, conventional, usually brutal little total communities' gradually evolved into acknowledged centres of academic excellence, as keen on science as organised games, 'fairly relaxed about sex, and moderate in discipline' - but to which access still 'depends largely on class and entirely on money.'

The public school phenomenon, 597-1977

Hodder&Stoughton Ltd

<p>Originally published in England under the title "The Public School Phenomenom, 597-1977."<br><br> Though there have been previous books about the British public schools, this long, entertaining, and probing work stands in a class by itself. The author gives us the whole chronicle from the Dark Ages through the crucial and formative nineteenth century to the modern phenomenaof girls' and progressive schools. It is a story which must fascinate anyone anywhere concerned with education, children, class, society, or the human condition.</p>

The Old School Tie: The Phenomenom of the English Public School

Viking Adult

Aged 17, Gerald Brenan suggested to his friend Hope Johnstone that they settle together somewhere east of Pamirs. Surprisingly, the eccentric dandy agreed. They fled England in the summer of 1912: by winter Hope had collapsed, but not until the following February, freezing, penniless and having walked 1,500 miles, did Gerald give up. His life was to be studded with adventure. After World War I, Brenan spent four years alone in the remote Alpujarran mountains. Here he educated himself with 2000 books, wrote furiously and began his tormented and ecstatic love-affair with Dora Carrington, companion to Lytton Stratchey. He was drawn to the 1920s underworld - both in London and Seville - of prostitutes, flamenco singers and the poor. He was tormented by his sexuality, which was, like for many of his class and time, contorted and difficult. This book looks into this with insight and sensitivity, in a way which Brenan was unable to, even in his two autobiographies of which "A Life of One's Own" was one. But it was the Spanish Civil War and marriage to the poetess, Gamel Woolsey, that produced books auch as "The Spanish Labyrinth" and "South From Granada". Brenan knew some of the most brilliant people of his time, including Augustus John, Roger Fry, Bertrand Russell, Cyril Connolly, David Garnett, V.S. Pritchett, Lorca, e.e. cummings and - though he never belonged to the group - he didn't think it existed - Bloomsbury.

The Interior Castle

Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd.

Half an Arch

Timewell Press

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Books by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy