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  • Published: 26 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473593312
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Sad Little Men

Private Schools and the Ruin of England




A passionate, personal book by a prize-winning memoir writer about boarding schools, the damage they do, and power in this country

'Read this book' Alastair Campbell

'A really wonderful book' Nigella Lawson via Twitter

In 1975 Richard Beard was sent away to boarding school. So were Boris Johnson and David Cameron.

He didn't enjoy it. But the first and most important lesson was not to let that show.

A public school education has long been accepted in Britain as a preparation for leadership, but being separated from your parents at a young age is traumatic. What sort of adult does it mould? Tackling debates about privilege head-on, Sad Little Men reveals what happens when you put a succession of men from boarding schools into positions of influence, including at 10 Downing Street, and asks the question: is this really who we want in charge?

'The most important book I've read this year' Adam Rutherford

  • Published: 26 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473593312
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

About the author

Richard Beard

Richard Beard is the author of Acts of the Assassins which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and most recently, The Day That Went Missing. In the twenty years since his first book he has published critically acclaimed novels and narrative non-fiction, including Becoming Drusilla, the story of how a friendship between two men was changed by a gender transition. He was formerly director of the National Academy of Writing in London, and is now a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He is an optimistic opening batsman for the Authors Cricket Club.

Also by Richard Beard

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Praise for Sad Little Men

If you want to understand the aura of entitlement and untouchability shrouding our governing class, look no further than Beard's witty, unsparingly sharp and deeply moving anatomy of the emotional culture of England's boarding schools

Josh Cohen

Engaging and readable, powerful and cogent. A vivid portrait of the political elite exposed for the vulnerable men/ children they are

Joy Schaverien, author of Boarding School Syndrome

A sensitive and incisive analysis of the British class system has no right to be as insanely readable and enjoyable as this book manages to be

Tom Holland, author of Dominion

Utterly compelling, top proper stuff. I loved it to bits. The energy of it! I really felt for them (all) by the end

Ian Marchant, Author of A Hero for High Times

Really good, clever, dazzling in its anger and the force of its argument

Nicola Shulman, Times Literary Supplement

Read this book

Alastair Campbell

[A] brilliant book... Beard's breathtaking personal account of the British habit of the British habit of institutionalising elite children captures all the nuances and subtleties of the boarder's undoing and its lasting legacy into adulthood

Nick Duffell, Therapy Today

Definitive and brilliantly expressed

Viv Groskop

Read this book

Alastair Campbell

Definitive and brilliantly expressed

Viv Groskop

Dazzling in its anger and the force of its argument

Times Literary Supplement

A sensitive and incisive analysis of the British class system...insanely readable

Tom Holland, author of Dominion

One of the finest polemics I have ever come across... Sad Little Men has been an eye-opener

Spectator

[A] brilliantly excoriating book

New Statesman