Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class
Alex Renton
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This is the story of generations of parents, Britain's richest and grandest, who believed that being miserable at school was necessary to make a good and successful citizen. Childish suffering was a price they accepted for the preservation of their class, and their entitlement. The children who were moulded by this misery and abuse went on - as they still do - to run Britain's public institutions and private companies.
Confronting the truth of his own schooldays and the crimes he witnessed, Alex Renton has revealed a much bigger story. It is of a profound malaise in the British elite, shown up by tolerance of the abuse of its own children that amounts to collusion. This culture and its traditions, and the hypocrisy, cronyism and conspiracy that underpin them, are key to any explanation of the scandals over sexual abuse, violence and cover-up in child care institutions that are now shocking the nation.
As Renton shows, complicity in this is the bleak secret at the heart of today's British elite.
Read by David Thorpe.
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group
Read MorePraise for Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class
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At last, a scrupulously honest insight into private boarding education in Britain - ranging from the abuse to which it subjects the child, and the family, to the abuse of Britain's social order in laying the foundation to buying your child's way to the topRenton mixes memoir and anecdote with deeply researched history ... this is a brave and necessary book - GUARDIAN
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