In an early section on his first days at a boys’ school he recorded, “Teaching was good, though not at all intensive. Mr. Gibbs, an attractive personality, showed that it was perfectly possible for a headmaster to be also a nice man.” I reeled back as I read this betrayal of the canonical tradition; no self-respecting Brit can write about his early education without at least some reference to sadism and misery, and to my knowledge no author has tried it since Byron set the standard. So one is relieved to find that at his very next school Powell was starved and brow-beaten, and that by the time
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