This is the first modern history of one of the most famous schools in the English-speaking world. It takes an even-handed approach, covering the schools failings as well as its successes. It includes frank discussions of Harrow's financial, educational, and sexual scandals along with a survey of its many great moments as the school of Byron, Churchill (and six other prime ministers), and Nehru.

Olive Sharkey is the daughter of farmers in the midlands of Ireland. 'I belong to a family which was the last in our district to relinquish the old ways on the land and in the home,' she says. Her research brought her to folk museums throughout Ireland and 'into the homes of fascinating elderly folk with surprisingly clear memories.' The daily and seasonal rhythms of life and work 'in the ould days' is recaptured, from building the house and turning the sod for a new crop, to saving the hay and burying the dead.

In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. "She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.” In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.

Games obsessed the Victorian and Edwardian public schools. The obsession has become widely known as athleticism. When it appeared in 1981, this book was the first major study of the games ethos which dominated the lives of many Victorian and Edwardian public schoolboys. Written with Professor Mangan's customary panache, it has become a classic, the seminal work on the social and cultural history of modern sport.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.