St Paul’s in reflective nonfiction

Other things on their minds

Editorial interpretation · Selected accounts of different school generations, read by September 2026

What does a school look like to people who had other things on their minds? This reading started with Janan Ganesh’s chapter on George Osborne and has since spread, as these things do, to memoirs, biographies, letters, older histories and the original testimony behind some of the books. It is a broad first bibliography with the accessible passages consulted, and makes no claim to have found every nonfiction book that mentions St Paul’s, or to have read the restricted ones in full.

Nor do the books describe one school. St Paul’s kept its name but moved, and its pupils, subjects and social arrangements changed, so that writers a generation apart may in effect remember different schools, rather as the regulars of a restaurant that has changed its address and its menu can disagree entirely about what the place was like. Memoirs also over-represent the people who later had the wish, and the chance, to write one, and the boy who never felt the urge has, by definition, left nothing on this shelf.

Distinctions

Historical account · Chesterton’s 1936 recollection and school histories published in 1901 and 1909

The earliest account here comes from an admirer. Cotton Minchin, especially pages 268–269, writing in 1901, admires the school and still raises an awkward doubt about whether so concentrated a pursuit of distinctions serves its less conspicuous pupils, before weighing, fairly enough, the case that a shared seriousness about work benefits them too. The doubt sits inside the praise, in the old book itself, so nobody can say that a later and less friendly reader put it there.

Pupils do not only attend a school; some of them make pieces of it, magazines and societies especially, and the pieces are most revealing when their standing is a little untidy. McDonnell’s 1909 history, pages 451–459, records that The Debater was officially recognised with a rider attached, which was that its contributors’ promise exceeded their distinction in class, so the approval arrives already wearing a school report. He is just as exact about the Union’s arrangements as a club, down to how its members were elected, and details like these give a reader something to work with, as an adjective, however warmly meant, never does.

Distinction comes up in both histories, one notices, and when Chesterton came to write about the school himself, in 1936, he went the other way. The third chapter of Autobiography is “How to Be a Dunce”, and in it the boy who loved poetry and the boy who hid that love from his classmates are remembered as one and the same, which is the joke, since most of us will recognise the act. The friendship, the private verse and the organising energy behind a magazine are more interesting than any retrospective assurance that the school was full of future writers. The chapter has its prejudices too; they belong to the grown man holding the pen, and are best kept in plain view.

G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (1936), chapter III, How to Be a Dunce

Michael F. J. McDonnell, A History of St. Paul’s School (1909), printed pages 451–459

J. G. Cotton Minchin, Our Public Schools (1901), especially printed pages 268–269

Assemblies and house parties

Alumni testimony · Atrium, Autumn/Winter 2019

An alumni magazine is an institution talking to its own, and one reads it with an eyebrow raised, as one reads a round-robin letter at Christmas. All the same, the Autumn/Winter 2019 issue of Atrium is a primary source for its named contributors’ recollections and views, and candid, distinctive writing can survive the setting. The school they remember is inhabited by people of different allegiances. Jewish assemblies, Christian Union holidays, subject teaching and later friendships hold different places in their memories.

In Simon Lovick’s “Judaism and St Paul’s”, Benji Stanley and Anthony Lazarus remember different cohorts. Stanley credits an English teacher with an interpretative habit that mattered later, in the rabbinate, while finding little room at school for his own religious exploration, and a fair account lets the gratitude and the unease stand together without hurrying to reconcile them. Lazarus remembers Jewish assemblies as a partly self-made space of comic invention, which, as assemblies go, is high praise. In the conversation about Christian Union house parties, affection, friendship and unstructured time keep company with a sense of Christianity’s changing place at the school, and the jokes now and then puncture a speaker’s claims, as old friends’ jokes will, without denting his affection.

Some help comes from a piece that is not about the school at all. Robin Hirsch’s “The Coffeehouse Comes to the New World” is no kind of school testimony, but it moves between place, company and what was understood only afterwards, treating the writer’s earlier self as part of the inquiry, and a voice that discerning has room to find something out. As a model for anyone looking back on a school, it beats any number of confident judgements.

The central shelf: early memoirs

Editorial interpretation · Books first published from 1936 to 1963; access recorded on 30 September 2026

This shelf holds the books closest to the inquiry, not everything an Old Pauline happened to publish, with the memoirs first, in the order in which they appeared; each entry says how far our reading got, which is also how far this account can go.

1. G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (1936). Chapter III, “How to Be a Dunce”, discussed above. Substantial passages about the school were read at first hand in the public text, which is unpaginated, so the chapter is the reliable locator; the rest of the book has not been read for this account.

2. Edward Thomas, The Childhood of Edward Thomas (1938). Chapter X, “Public School: First Impressions”, occupies pages 266–272 in the 2011 Oxford University Press Autobiographies, and the chapter is precisely located but unread. The memoir ends on the threshold of public-school life, so the title is no more than the truth, first impressions being all it has to give of the school. A separate authorised childhood extract was read for its narrative method, and is no evidence of St Paul’s atmosphere.

3. E. C. Bentley, Those Days (1940). Bentley remembers the circle Chesterton describes, which makes him a second witness to the same friendships, just what a self-portrait needs. The book is identified and its school chapter unread, so he has been found but not yet heard.

4. Paul Nash, Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings (1949). School, career expectations and art education are the subjects to look for. Nash has been met only at second hand, in the short autobiographical quotations within James Russell’s essay “Dear Old Thomas & Lucky Paul”, and the complete school section remains unread; David Boyd Haycock’s account of editing the 2016 edition supplies further editorial context.

5. Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880–1904 (1960). The St Paul’s period is the place to read; the book and its relevance are clear, but the school text was unavailable in the legitimate online holdings consulted, so for now the WorldCat record and Internet Archive holding can only identify the work.

6. E. H. Shepard, Drawn from Life (1961). School, and the passage towards art training, make this the memoir to read. The work is identified; its school text remains unread.

7. Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Two, 1891–1900 (1963). Schooldays and London life are what to read it for. Bibliographic and archival records were consulted, enough to say what the book is but not what is in it; the autobiographical text that matters remains unread.

The central shelf: later recollections

Editorial interpretation · Books first published from 1952 to 2010; access recorded on 30 September 2026

With the later books the difficulty changes. The earlier memoirs plainly had their school pages somewhere, even when those were out of reach; here one sometimes can’t tell whether the school gets any real space at all.

8. Victor Gollancz, My Dear Timothy (1952). Childhood and school years make this the volume to read; its scope is clear, though the exact school passages have not been located. The University of Birmingham catalogue, page 87, keeps it apart from the 1953 sequel, More for Timothy, whose much-discussed teaching experience concerns Repton and belongs on that school’s shelf.

9. J. E. Littlewood, A Mathematician’s Miscellany (1953), expanded as Littlewood’s Miscellany (1986). “A Mathematical Education” begins on page 80 in the 1986 edition, as exact an address as one could want for a chapter that remains unread; the publisher’s foreword extract was located through its indexed text.

10. Eric Newby, A Traveller’s Life (1982). Chapter 7, “Journeys Through Darkest Hammersmith 1928–36”, occupies pages 62–75 in the 2013 edition. The contents were consulted but the chapter itself was unavailable, and the original hardback need not number its pages the same way.

11. Kenneth Dover, Marginal Comment: A Memoir (1994). The school period spreads across overlapping chapters, as memories do, and the 2023 Memoir Revisited, edited by Stephen Halliwell and Christopher Stray, points to chapters 3–7 as the places to start. The editors’ introduction and contents were consulted; the memoir chapters remain unread.

12. Robin Hirsch, Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski (1995). Identity, childhood and school would be the subjects, if school is covered at any length. The book is verified, but no school passage has been confirmed; his coffeehouse essay in Atrium, read separately, is discussed above.

13. Anthony Shaffer, So What Did You Expect?: A Memoir (2001). The title is fair warning. Wartime school years would be the subject, on the same terms, and while the book and school connection are verified, whether it contains a school passage is still unknown.

14. Nicholas Parsons, With Just a Touch of Hesitation, Repetition and Deviation: My Life in Comedy (2010). School recollections, if included, are the relevant reading, and the book is identified but unread. Two first-person interviews were consulted instead, Parsons’s substantial teacher recollection in Tes and the early-life portion of The Arts Desk interview, and their testimony is evidence in its own right; nobody pretends the memoir has been read.

The central shelf: biographies, letters and essays

Editorial interpretation · Books published from 1998 to 2019 and their earlier source material; access recorded on 30 September 2026

15. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998). Schooldays are the subject, and here the reading went behind the book, to original interview passages in Tape 4 of the biographical interviews, particularly transcript pages 19–23, with adjacent school discussion in Tape 6; the corresponding book chapter was not accessed. The archive describes its transcripts as imperfect, and its page numbering may change, so it is worth citing the tape as well as the page.

16. Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946. Berlin’s own letters belong beside the biography. Early school journalism and correspondence, including material on pages 7–8, are identified in the editor’s official bibliography, and the Cambridge front matter confirms an opening schoolboy request to Chesterton for a contribution, which lets the first book on this shelf back in by a side door. The passages can be found; they have not been read.

17. Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten (2001) and On the Move (2015). The school-period autobiographical passages are the relevant reading. The books are identified; those passages have not been read directly for this account.

18. Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place (2019). The essay that matters is “Libraries”, and its earlier authorised form, “On Libraries”, published in The Threepenny Review in 2014, was read in full; the version in the later collection has not been collated with it.

19. Kate Bassett, In Two Minds: A Biography of Jonathan Miller (2012). Chapter 3 is “1947–53 St Paul’s School”. The contents and opening preview were consulted, but that chapter was unavailable; it is a promising place to continue, though until it is read it supplies no account to interpret.

20. Janan Ganesh, George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor (2012). Chapter 2, “History Boy”, at Google Books preview images PT18–PT20, which were read with adjacent context at PT16–PT17; those are preview-image identifiers, not printed page numbers, and the complete book has not been read. The school episode is developed in St Paul’s School and the social life of an idea.

Beyond the central shelf

Historical account · Institutional histories and related scholarship from 1865 onwards

Beyond the central shelf are the institutional accounts and some less familiar witnesses, McDonnell and Minchin having already earned their places through the particular disagreements discussed above. The oldest book in the reading is Howard Staunton’s The Great Schools of England (1865), read at printed pages 164–166 and 178–182, which describes where a library stood, who could use it and what was provided for the masters’ labour, illness and old age. A library’s address and its rules of admission can say more about a school than any general declaration of love for literature, and Staunton, to his credit, gives the address.

The wider bibliography takes in Cyril Moses Picciotto’s St Paul’s School (1939), Michael McDonnell’s Annals (1959), F. R. Salter’s St Paul’s School, 1909–1959 (1959), A. N. G. Richards’s account of the West Kensington buildings (1968), A. H. Mead’s A Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1990), David Bussey’s John Colet’s Children (2009) and Martin Stephen’s The English Public School (2018). All remain leads, their relevant primary passages unread, as do W. N. Marcy’s Reminiscences of a Public Schoolboy (1932) and Hubert Arthur Sams’s Pauline and Old Pauline, 1884–1931 (1933). Cyril Bailey’s Memoirs, whatever the title suggests, is an archival manuscript lead and not a published book.

Scholarship on Colet and Milton opens another door into the school, through J. H. Lupton’s A Life of John Colet (1887; new edition 1909), Donald Lemen Clark’s John Milton at St. Paul’s School (1948) and John B. Gleason’s John Colet (1989), whose school chapters have not been read for this account. They are a way into particular educational purposes and exercises, provided one doesn’t assume that a later writer’s distinction tells us what the boy at the next desk received.

The clearest gaps, and the most immediate, are the substantive school sections of Woolf, Bentley, Newby, Dover and Bassett, which would add a good deal more than another catalogue of distinguished former pupils, a form in no danger of dying out. Nor can a memoir be assumed to portray the school merely because its author attended it; John Simpson’s Days from a Different World (2005), for one, concerns the childhood years before his St Paul’s period.

Michael F. J. McDonnell, A History of St. Paul’s School (1909), printed pages 451–459

J. G. Cotton Minchin, Our Public Schools (1901), especially printed pages 268–269

Howard Staunton, The Great Schools of England (1865), printed pages 164–166 and 178–182

Leaving the verdict open

Editorial interpretation · Interpretation of the dated readings above

Magazines keep turning up in these pages – the one in Chesterton’s chapter, The Debater with its rider, Berlin’s school journalism and his request to Chesterton, and Osborne’s history magazine, where this reading began – and with a little effort one could build a Pauline temperament out of them. It would be a mistake, since the episodes come from different generations and, in some ways, different schools. Osborne’s magazine is one revealing episode among others, and it helps a reader understand a particular young person’s intellectual life; made to carry a political verdict, or an institutional one, it would buckle under either.

Between what a school intends and how its inhabitants actually live there is always some distance, which is much of what makes these accounts worth reading, since a remembered conversation, or one awkward encounter, can complicate the picture a school paints of itself without settling what everyone experienced there. The companion portrait of St Paul’s follows that conversation into the school’s societies, teaching and arrangements for support, and this bibliography sets out the reading behind it, gaps and all. Most of the gaps can be closed with time and a good library, and any of them may yet complicate the portrait; the one that never will be belongs to the boy who never felt the urge to write any of it down, and who may, for all anyone knows, have had the best time of the lot.

Sources and limits

• A selective bibliography. It does not claim to have found every nonfiction book that mentions St Paul’s, or to have read the books listed in full; unread chapters and inaccessible passages are named one by one.
• Memoirs, institutional histories, interviews and school publications are written for different purposes. A remembered episode is evidence of the account that records it, not a representative measure of every pupil’s experience or an assessment of the school today.
• The school in question is St Paul’s School, London. St Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and St Paul’s Girls’ School are separate institutions.