The Heirs of Tom Brown

<p>In their heyday, the English public schools inspired an astonishing effusion of novels and stories about school life, of which <b>Tom Brown''s Schooldays</b> is perhaps still the best known, and was certainly the most influential. <br><br>Continually counterpointing school life as it really was with its fictional image, Isabel Quigly discusses her chosen stories in relation to those themes which recur in the genre: the cult of games, the love story, the boarding school as a training ground for the Empire, schoolboy heroics and an extraordinary preoccupation with death. Her range is wide: from classics like <b>Stalky & Co</b>, Anstey''s <b>Vice Versa</b>, and P. G. Wodehouse''s school stories, to the schoolgirl tales of Angela Brazil: from nostalgic and snobbish accounts of Eton to Alec Waugh''s daring and precocious novel, <b>The Loom of Youth</b><i>.<br></i><br><b>The Heirs of Tom Brown </b>is an entertaining and original investigation into the literary, social and cultural history of the English school story. <br><br>''An excellent guide to this curious but interesting chapter in social and literary history'' John Rae, <i>Listener</i></p>