Gilded Youth

[An] entertaining and rather racy history of subversiveness at the great public schools. . . . The details are glorious and told with relish. --Financial Times Deplore it or revere it, you cannot but respect the private school industry's wart-like survival in modern Britain. . . . The class that runs Britain has always practiced tolerance and absorption of its enemies and critics as a strategy in its long survival. Brooke-Smith's highly entertaining cultural history of the British public school has many examples of this tendency. --Alex Renton Spectator [Brooke-Smith's] thesis is spot on--that the public school rebels who embrace counterculture can still rely on rich families, powerful contacts, and polished manners to get them through. --Catholic Herald For a scholarly study of the British educational system's upper tier, Gilded Youth is unusually rife with tension. . . . The commitment to impartiality is elegantly set down in a chapter about the 'secret life' of the Victorian schoolboy. . . . Yet it soon becomes clear that he was asked to leave the public school at which he fetched up (Shrewsbury) in his mid-teens, hates the institution that nurtured him like poison, and would like to see its playing fields dug up for cabbages. All this gives these well-researched pages on the theme of public school 'rebellion' an undeniable piquancy. --Guardian Gilded Youth is an entertaining but serious study of how public schools came about, their history, and their preeminent position today. --Country Life [Gilded Youth] comes dripping with liberal guilt. . . . He simply hates the institution and wants it demolished forthwith. --Private Eye