Stiff Upper Lip

Author Alex Renton
Narrator David Thorpe
Publisher Orion
Run Time 11 hours and 56 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Independent schools, private education, Moral and social purpose of education, Politics and government.

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What to expect

This is the story of generations of parents, Britain's richest and grandest, who believed that being miserable at school was necessary to make a good and successful citizen. Childish suffering was a price they accepted for the preservation of their class, and their entitlement. The children who were moulded by this misery and abuse went on - as they still do - to run Britain's public institutions and private companies.

Confronting the truth of his own schooldays and the crimes he witnessed, Alex Renton has revealed a much bigger story. It is of a profound malaise in the British elite, shown up by tolerance of the abuse of its own children that amounts to collusion. This culture and its traditions, and the hypocrisy, cronyism and conspiracy that underpin them, are key to any explanation of the scandals over sexual abuse, violence and cover-up in child care institutions that are now shocking the nation.

As Renton shows, complicity in this is the bleak secret at the heart of today's British elite.

Read by David Thorpe.

(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group

Critics Review

At last, a scrupulously honest insight into private boarding education in Britain – ranging from the abuse to which it subjects the child, and the family, to the abuse of Britain’s social order in laying the foundation to buying your child’s way to the top
Jon Snow
Renton mixes memoir and anecdote with deeply researched history… this is a brave and necessary book
GUARDIAN
A thoughtful and sensitive indictment of one of the cornerstones of the British establishment
OBSERVER
Gruelling and gripping
EVENING STANDARD
Renton has the thirst for truth, and for exposing depravity, of a Gitta Sereny
THE TIMES
[A] masterful expose of private school perversion
SKY NEWS
Stiff Upper Lip is shocking, gripping and sobering
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Enormously valuable
DAILY MAIL
Stiff Upper Lip kept me absolutely enthralled … Even if you never went near a public school, the book is a phenomenal read: it kept me up all night
NEWSTALK
Impressive in its breadth and depth
DAILY EXPRESS
Stiff Upper Lip is a furious, closely researched polemic against boarding school
COUNTRY LIFE
Quite breathtaking … If you want to understand anything about institutional abuse it is required reading
LBC
Grimly absorbing
NEW STATESMAN
This is a fascinating book
PROSPECT
Personal revelations are expertly woven into interview material, social history and theorising by psychologists and other writers … Renton deserves praise and attention for disturbing our equanimity about this tradition
FINANCIAL TIMES
This is a well-researched study, which draws on a variety of historical sources in addition to some searing near-contemporary accounts of childhood unhappiness and its long-lasting effects
THE TABLET
Brilliantly deconstructs the myth of the British stiff upper lip
Rod Liddle

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