This is a book where readers will certainly differ in their reactions according to whether they choose it because of the author or because of the title and subject. Those looking for a serious examination of the English public school system will come away not much the wiser, but fans of Simon Raven will find an enjoyable sequence of salacious anecdotes, containing much the same mix of fact and fiction as his novels.

The anecdotes that make up this "memoir" are put into the mouths of various people he encountered at different stages in his career: a Jewish godparent, an uncle who gives him the basic data about schoolboy sex, various teachers, fellow undergraduates and army officers. All are presented in direct speech (even the stories he was supposedly told when he was seven-and-a-half years old), so we know that we shouldn't take them too literally as testimony: it is a novelist's way of setting different points of view for us.

Raven approves of public schools, of course, but he approves of them for typically outrageous reasons. They provide endless opportunities for harmless, pleasurable sex; they teach intellectually challenging but useless knowledge (Greek grammar; Latin verse composition); and above all, they produce an arrogant, self-confident élite, indefensible but utterly unscrupulous in its own defence, without which life (especially for the novelist) would be too dull for words. His straw men find plenty to bitch about: public schools are intolerant of Jews and of those who refuse to fit in; they demand not participation (in games, religion, whatever), but total allegiance; those who mock their institutions and those who deviate in the most minor ways from dress codes and similar arcane conventions are punished far more harshly then those who cheat, steal, or abuse their fellow scholars; schools other than Charterhouse are variously bourgeois, arrogant, philistine, boorish or hypocritically pious; the public school system tramples on the faces of the poor; the public school myth (as represented in the boys' magazines of Raven's youth) sets up an impossible dream of what education should be like; public school politics teaches utter contempt for outsiders and puts the preservation of the group above all other moral values. Of course, Raven sees (or provocatively pretends to see) many of these "arguments against" as reasons for seeing public schools as a good thing in themselves.

Obviously there are scores of various kinds being settled here. We should remember that Raven was proud of having been expelled from Charterhouse "for the usual reason". By claiming to espouse élitist values, he was irritating the élite that had tried to get rid of him, and at the same time stirring up the peasants by revealing to them just how unjustly privileged their betters were. Fun for all. His defence of Jews and attack on Roman Catholics is probably calculated to annoy as well, rather than revealing his true opinions (although Barber does point out in his biography that Raven resented his mother's conversion to Catholicism). ( )