Very Private School
THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
A Times, Spectator and Waterstones Book of the Year
'Shocking and moving' Guardian
'Top marks for its searing frankness, framed in wistfully beautiful prose’ The Times
At eight years of age, Charles Spencer was sent away to one of England's most England's most exclusive boarding schools. Here he reveals the strange secrets of the school, and the culture of cruelty and abuse he experienced in his five years there as pupil.
Spencer reflects on the misery, hopelessness and abandonment he felt aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness and the vicious brutality of a boys' school in the 1970s. All these years later, Spencer's bafflement at the teachers' motivations to inflict such cruelty on young children in palpable. As is his fury that, even if somehow he had spoken up, he'd never have been believed.
Charles Spencer's book 'A Very Private School' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 11-03-2024.
Charles Spencer was educated at Eton College and obtained his degree in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a reporter on NBC’s Today show from 1986 until 1995, and is the author of seven books, including the Sunday Times bestsellers The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream (picked as a Best Book Of The Year by The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily Mail And The Daily Express), Blenheim: Battle for Europe (shortlisted for History Book of the Year, National Book Awards) and Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I.