Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England > Status Update

'Also I should have got to know my father, which would have been a joy to me.' - or so he assumes. Having raised my three teenagers at home, with similar results to me having been at school, I not sure how it works when out of sight, is out of mind or absence makes the heart grow fonder.

"We were taught to look down on the grammar school prime ministers, the proles, the women, the blacks, the queers and the foreigners..." - I wasn't, I must have gone to a different sort of school.

"One of those Cambridge spies. Anthony Blunt, worked for the Queen and had the codename 'Johnson'." - now we're drifting away into conspiracy theory

"In 'Heart of Darkness' Crusoe's near namesake Kurtz is emotionally isolated cut also 'hollow to the core' - neither were intended by their authors to be English, let alone an English Archetype, and neither went to an English boarding school.

"Even Cameron's Eton teachers, according to Sonia Purnell, claimed not to remember teaching him. The point is, any of us could have been prime minister" - this isn't true, and if Beard would be less disappointed if realised it.

""The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root." Which is surprising, because that was how our childhood was shaped." - speak for yourself, I agree with Orwell, our childhood was shaped by custom not power. This is the difference between Cameron and Johnson: one resigned, the other hangs on to power at all costs.

"And when public school politicians pose as populists and radicals, the fraudulance is close to absurd." - this is true of any populist politician, from Caesar to Trump. Populism is always led by a disaffected member of the elite.

"Private schools account for 70 per cent of the ... barristers in the country..." - if you can afford private school you can afford a pupilage.

"It helped that ambition was essentially a confidence trick, and a socially acceptable method to outrun a damaged self." - he overlooks the private schoolboy trope of effortless superiority, ambition was never acceptable, success is simply expected.

"As middle-aged, these boys make for a desperately sad film. A commodity broker, single in his late forties and living in Hong Kong, has savings to cover the private education of the children he doesn't have" - so many living abroad, so many still single: a consequence, of the huge burden their education placed on them.