John Dugdale
High-School Jihad
It’s striking how often America’s senior novelists have recently chosen education as a theme, as if identifying the way the country’s youth are taught and socialised as the key to its current malaise. In Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain or Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, it’s a university that comes under scrutiny; but the latest work by John Updike, a teacher’s son, centres initially on a school.
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With just a few days to go until the first issue of the new decade, does anyone recognise the stern figure on our February cover?
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From the archive, Kate Kellaway on a 1988 production of 'The Taming of the Shrew'.
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