When I saw this book, i thought it might be one of those fun boarding school type stories. I wasn't too far from wrong. It's fascinating, as an outsider to British schools, to read about the class structure found within their schools. So much segregation! But at the same time, kids, for the most time will be kids and teachers and parents the same! It's not an exciting book, but may bring a smile or laugh or two while reading it. I am ever so glad John Rae's Diaries were published!

As the product of an English post -graduate education, I can relate to the attitudes and eccentricities of the author of this book.

His diary, covering well over a decade of his tenure as the headmaster of one of Britain's oldest and most elitist public (private) schools, tells the reader much about the English class system but also about an educator who realized that the England of the Empire age had given way to world where snobbishness still exercised a hold over many but was slowly giving way to a multicultural, cannabis smoking generation that was caught between the worlds of yesterday and tomorrow.

For anyone wanting to understand how English upper class privilege was shaped and how it began its descent into irrelevance, this book will be an excellent introduction.

I enjoy books in or about boarding schools and was intrigued with the premise of this memoir/journal. For journal entries, the episodes were well written. However, the monotony of actual journal entries (which these are) overtook my enjoyment. It's difficult to create narrative by merely editing chronological journal entries and here the narrative threads seemed disjointed or incomplete because of the format.