Richard Beard is the author of Acts of the Assassins, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and most recently the memoir The Day That Went Missing, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and won the PEN Ackerley Prize. In the United States the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the twenty years since his first book, he has published critically acclaimed novels and narrative non-fiction, including Becoming Drusilla, the story of how a friendship between two men was changed by a gender transition. He has served as a judge for Canada's Giller Prize and for the BBC and Costa Short Story Awards, and is a dour opening batsman for the Authors Cricket Club.
A sensitive and incisive analysis of the British class system has no right to be as insanely readable and enjoyable as this book manages to be * Tom Holland, author of Dominion * Engaging and readable, powerful and cogent. A vivid portrait of the political elite exposed for the vulnerable men/ children they are * Joy Schaverien, author of Boarding School Syndrome * Well written... everyone...should pick it up for the insights into how being sent away by their parents shaped the characters of our wounded leaders -- Clive Stafford Smith * Times Literary Supplement * If you want to understand the aura of entitlement and untouchability shrouding our governing class, look no further than Beard's witty, unsparingly sharp and deeply moving anatomy of the emotional culture of England's boarding schools * Josh Cohen * Read this book * Alastair Campbell *