This book falls into two distinct parts. The first is the author’s account of his own life until he left Oxford in disgrace. John Joll- iffe, the son of Lord Hylton, passed his childhood and youth at Mells, in Somerset, the home of the Asquith family, and at neighbouring Ammerdown, the seat of the Hyltons. Children in large houses were shoved upstairs to the nursery. In his father’s world, Jolliffe writes, the gap between generations ‘was deep in a way that would be unthinkable today, where parents and children live at such close quarters from the start’. This may have been a sea-change in the mores of the upper class, but the less privileged have lived at such close quarters for centuries.

His description of everyday life at Eton will fascinate those unfamiliar with that peculiar institution. He received an excellent intellectual training in the classics, but he found the process tedious and demoralising. Both at Eton and Oxford he seems to have lacked the guidance of a tutor who could inspire him, just as he had found no help with life’s problems from his conventional and reserved father. At Eton he acquired that suspicion of liberal progressives which was to mark his life. The headmaster, Robert Birley, was one such progressive. He became for Jolliffe ‘the most long-winded man at Eton’. Arriving at Christ Church, he professes to have found the Oxford of the 1950s an innocent place: no drugs, no promiscuous sex, but orderly, respectably dressed students and an upper class still enjoying the last of the deb dances. Alas, the more raffish members of the smart set brought disaster on themselves by indulging in the vices of the ancien régime: drinking and gambling. Lapsing into laziness, Jolliffe obtained a third-class degree and was sent down for a minor disciplinary peccadillo. Neither Roy Harrod nor myself could save him from dons who, as I appear to have told one of them, behaved as weak men pretending to be strong.

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