“Like many other institutions at the present day, the public schools are on trial. They have to defend themselves against the merciless criticism which insists that in these new days even those things which are time-honoured and old must prove their present worth or make way for something better.”

So reads an editorial in The Church Times commenting on the “rattling” of the “gilded cages” by the publication of The Loom of Youth, Alec Waugh’s steamy novel of private-school life. That was in 1917. We await the “something better”.

Malcolm Tozer, Portscatho, Cornwall.