Word: etonian
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...firm, has no patience for the self-pleased. "I tell the boys that 30% of them are going to work for a Chinese or Indian company," he says. "They're going to be judged on what they are and can do, not where they came from. Being an Old Etonian won't be that relevant." But being a New Etonian could very well turn out to be. For years, many of modern Britain's proud meritocrats have thought of the school as a four-letter word, typifying everything that was wrong about a class-bound society, a generator of snobs...
...much of Britain today, being an Etonian is not something you really want to brag about. The well of resentment is too deep. Rory, a student in his fourth year (students' last names are being withheld at the school's request), still regrets answering honestly on a transatlantic flight when his seatmate asked where he went to school. "For six hours he kept making snide remarks," he says. Douglas Hurd, Margaret Thatcher's Foreign Secretary, wrote in his memoir that his family believed "that if I had not gone to Eton I would have become Prime Minister in 1990." (That...
...each other in code. Most of all, I felt, they really knew how to be with each other, and that was the real Eton thing." Some boys now attending are the seventh unbroken generation of their family's male line; 40% of this year's intake have an Old Etonian father, uncle or grandfather. The most searing moment in Fraser's book is a testament to the underside of the intense human relationships the school can foster: a sinister, semi-erotic punishment for a minor infraction inflicted by the then headmaster, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, who, alone in his study...
...when he was a student in the 1960s, he thinks Eton is "more outward looking, more diverse and kinder." If so, that has helped those who leave it. A senior headhunter, John Viney of Zygos Partnership, says the job market has noticed the change in the school. Many Etonians used to be captains of industry; from the 1970s they fell out of favor as the less hidebound products of state schools and university growth supplanted them. "But the public schools like Eton have done a good job remaking themselves," says Viney. "They have money, they have good teachers, the kids...
...neither Bhutan nor Nepal were ever quite so transparent as outsiders liked to suppose. Kathmandu might have boasted an Old Etonian King, the finest apple pies this side of Iowa and all the mongrel props of what could be called Peace Corps imperialism, but it is still technically illegal to proselytize in Nepal, and as recently as 1990, up to 175 people were languishing in prison for spreading their Christianity. Freedom was always more in the eye of the foreign beholder than in the heart of the beheld. As for Bhutan's purity, it was to some extent imposed from...