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There is a story in private education circles of an apoplectic father who raged to the bursar that he was unable to find a prep school for his son ‘without central-heating’. It is probably apocryphal, but it reminds us of the mad heights to which some private schools have stretched: rowing lakes, glitzy IT centres, West End-style theatres and Olympic-sized swimming pools, no doubt necessary for storing the ever-growing associated fees.  My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire It wasn’t always this way. My entire 1950s schooling was an exercise in back-to-basics privation,

Tourists seeking to understand life in London often come up short. It’s not their fault. It is often said that London is a metropolis made up of city villages, each with its own unique personality and characteristics. Most tourists never make it past the invisible walls of central London. Why would they? No one flies to London with thoughts of visiting Tooting or Deptford, though they should – Tooting has, without a doubt, the best curry restaurants in the city. We Londoners scarcely know our own city. We are all blind men touching various parts of the elephant’s body. Many tourists return home without any idea of what it means

I’ve been to a talk by two very clever and talented men: the American novelist and critic Jonathan Lethem and the English documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. They were talking about Lethem’s book about his art collection, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. Never have I left a talk with such a warm glow of schadenfreude. Here were two gifted men who had nothing interesting to say about their chosen subject. It was an evening full of ArtSpeak and hot air, a facsimile of intelligent ‘cultural discourse’, as they say in the art world. The interesting Lethem and the brilliant Curtis had done the unthinkable: they’d become boring. Oh, what

I spent New Year’s Eve in the company of a former Anglican vicar who lost his faith and had the honesty to resign from the Church as a result. He said what I have long suspected; that almost none of those in the hierarchy of the Church today believe in the central tenets of their faith: the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection of the dead, the miracles of Jesus, the Trinity, Heaven and Hell, life after death, or even a benevolent God. To be told that the guardians of that faith are today little more than hollowed-out hypocrites going through the ritualistic motions is a tad dispiriting