What explains the peculiar British obsession with public schools?
Scholarships and prefects, speech days and boaters flung in the air, fourth-form bullies and savage canings by sadistic schoolmasters, playing up to play the game. An inexhaustible mythology surrounds the English public school  an institution that does much to define our national image, resonant with ideas about empire, class, and privilege that have been much contested yet remain ineradicable. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon has inspired a wealth of plays, novels, and films. Public schools  especially the male boarding variety  offer a ready template of a hermetically sealed community with tight codes of behaviour and rank from which there is no easy escape. Within this frame lies an inbuilt dramatic tension between what is permitted and what is repressed, what is said and unsaid, that can be played out for comic or tragic effect. Add to the recipe the ingredient of adolescent angst conflicting with duty-bound teacherly authority, and the dish will be irresistible. One of the finest excavations of this material is Terence Rattigans The Browning Version, produced many times on stage and screen since its premire in 1947. It is about to re-emerge at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, with Kenneth Branagh as the classics teacher Andrew Crocker-Harris, redeemed from professional disappointment and personal despair at the failure of his marriage by a gift of Brownings translation of Aeschyluss Agamemnon from a grateful pupil, Taplow. Rattigan was one of many writers drawing on his own experience here: he attended Harrow, where he both played First 11 cricket and led a mutiny from the Officers Training Corps. The play also draws on Hugh Walpoles once-popular but long-forgotten Edwardian novel Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, set in a second-rate public school where two masters, one an ageing failure and the other a personable young idealist, clash. Yet the tragedy of public-school staff  including the sympathetic eponymous hero of James Hiltons hugely successful novel and film of the mid-1930s, Goodbye, Mr Chips  is not as potent a theme as the misery and resentment of the boys who suffer under the injustices and hardships of the public-school mentality. This can be dated back to the horrendous Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby, but Dickenss expos predates reforms instituted by Thomas Arnold at Rugby in the 1830s. Arnolds exhortations imported a note of earnest moral uplift into the ethos and for a generation the challenges of public school seemed noble. In 1857 Thomas Hughess Tom Browns Schooldays presented a warmly romanticised picture of Arnolds Rugby, followed the next year by Frederic Farrars equally successful and even more sententious Eric, or Little by Little. Both became required reading for Victorian youth and ended up loathed. Revenge for past hurts would be taken. Eric Blair changed his name to George Orwell to avoid any association with Farrars book and Rudyard Kipling tore a strip off its po-faced sermonising in the exhilaratingly anarchic Stalky and Co. A keen admirer of Kipling was the film director Lindsay Anderson whose 1968 surrealist masterpiece If, filmed in Cheltenham College, not only references Kiplings most famous poem in its title but also translates Stalky and Cos spirit of defiance into the era of post-war radical Leftism, culminating in a massive shoot-out exploding all pieties and traditions.