Gilded Youth
Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School
Distributed for Reaktion Books
296 pages
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8 halftones
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6 1/4 x 9 1/4
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© 2019
Review Quotes
Financial Times
"[An] entertaining and rather racy history of subversiveness at the great public schools. . . . The details are glorious and told with relish."
Alex Renton | Spectator
"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."
Guardian
"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."
Private Eye
"[Gilded Youth] comes dripping with liberal guilt. . . . He simply hates the institution and wants it demolished forthwith."
Country Life
"Gilded Youth is an entertaining but serious study of how public schools came about, their history, and their preeminent position today."
Catholic Herald
“[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.”
Wilson Shugart | Open Letters Review
"To each icon, its iconoclasts: so goes Brooke-Smith’s excellent debut. . . . Few things are so emblematic of Britain as its elite schools and the posh culture that they export. Yet in the face of modern egalitarianism, why so? The key, Brooke-Smith holds, to understanding these self-fashioned bastions of 'organic tradition and national heritage,' continually 'at the center of national life,' lies in their own rebels. . . . Gilded Youth is our author’s own thorough, thoughtful, and articulate rebellion. Brooke-Smith acknowledges that he has 'chosen to be more one-sided' in his writing and indeed his dislike of public schools, one of which he attended for a time, is evident. But for all his bias, dedicated research abounds. His prose flows with material from novels, government reports, memoirs, and more, and 33 pages of partial bibliography tail the volume. Whatever his convictions, the breadth of his knowledge and the earnestness with which he approaches his subject make Gilded Youth a fantastic read that cannot be dismissed."
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