The genesis of this conflict is hard to explain, but the passions it inflamed were real. For all our avowed belief in the equality of the sexes, we still can’t help but assign gendered valences to even our most mundane behaviours and experiences, associations which can sometimes abruptly reverse polarity. Pink was once the boldest and most masculine of colours, until it suddenly wasn’t. Computer coding was the purview of female “calculators”, until it was overtaken in the Eighties by hungry hordes of Tech Bros.

And then there’s yoga: an athletic and spiritual practice originating among Indian men as early as the 10th century, and exported to the West by male gurus, beginning in the Twenties. One hundred years later, how things have changed. The gurus are gone — in some cases defenestrated by the #MeToo movement — and the entire enterprise has been fully subsumed by the same willowy-white-woman-wellness industrial complex that gave us Soul Cycle, Goop cleanses, and 500 different kinds of barre workouts. So complete is yoga’s feminine positionality in the West’s collective consciousness that it is now apparently necessary for niche varieties to crop up just for men.

So we have Broga, “a yoga class geared for men (where it’s okay if you can’t touch your toes)”. And among male professional athletes, per a recent New York Times write-up, we have “Joga”, a portmanteau of “yoga” and “jocks”, which suggests that something new, exotic and very, very manly is happening here. The JogaWorld website concurs: “Similar to Yoga, Joga involves physical postures, breathing, and relaxation techniques. However, where the goal of Yoga is to become more flexible and spiritually aware, Joga’s aim is to enhance performance, improve concentration, and reduce recovery time within the context of an athletic environment.”

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That said, if there’s a difference between improving flexibility and awareness via yoga and enhancing performance and concentration with JOGA, it’s not readily apparent (even if, as I did, you have watched the better part of a 56-minute explanatory YouTube video titled, “How is Joga REALLY Different?”) Much like goat yoga, power yoga, hot yoga and the briefly trendy “vino vinyasa” classes that involved sipping chardonnay between poses, Joga is really just yoga by another name, and marketed to a particular audience. Nevertheless, one gets the sense that we should not tell the men as much, lest we spook them off the mat.

The gender trajectory of yoga is a complicated one, a winding journey through a decades-long miasma of gender stereotypes, fitness fads and shifting, sex-specific beauty standards about what constitutes an ideal physique. Jane Fonda, Gwyneth Paltrow and the ubiquity of the phrase “long and lean” in fitness marketing certainly played their part here. But so too has the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and before that, Fight Club — for which the male actors cast as superheroes adopt a much-vaunted and highly publicised fitness regimen that transforms them from normal-looking human beings into walking sides of beef.

The lithe male physique of the Seventies and Eighties, the sinuous grace of a Baryshnikov, or even the androgynous sensuality of a David Bowie, have been side-lined in recent decades. In their place is a creeping conviction: that the ideal man should be so swole that he can barely fit through a doorway without turning sideways, let alone be able to touch his toes or balance gracefully on one leg. One thinks of Kevin Kline in the film In & Out, receiving lessons in manliness from a cassette book: “Men do not dance. They work. They drink. They have bad backs. They do not dance!” the instructions sneer. “Think about John Wayne! Arnold Schwarzenegger! Arnold doesn’t dance, he can barely walk!”

Arnold also did not do yoga (or if he did, he wasn’t telling anyone about it). In fact, for men who look like him, the practice can be challenging: the massive muscles that are so essential to the contemporary superhero aesthetic don’t just compromise flexibility but also create a literal obstacle to various yoga poses that require you to wrap one body part around another. There’s a reason the male gurus who popularised yoga in the US were all built like string beans. But these days, the aesthetic distinction between the body of an athlete versus a movie star versus a bodybuilder is increasingly non-existent; these men all aspire to the same physique, and they all follow the same weightlifting regimen and ingest the same substances (legal or otherwise) to get there.

Meanwhile, the few male celebrities who do announce themselves yogis tend to be, if not exactly effeminate, then certainly not beacons of wholesome, Captain America-style masculinity. It’s a type embodied by Adam Levine, perhaps the best-known of the male Hollywood yoga evangelists, who famously told a reporter from Details: “You know what yoga’s good for? I’ll tell you what yoga is good for: Fuuuu-k-ing!” (all while pointing at his penis and gyrating, apparently). As for Arnold himself, he still seems to consider body awareness and flexibility something of a joke.

Of course, the things that make yoga unappealing to men also make it a natural home for women, who continue to aspire to a sylph-like aesthetic — and to gravitate toward workouts that promise to “sculpt” and “tone” the body without bulking it. At the entry level, yoga is more accessible to women — not just because our bodies are naturally more flexible and hence better suited to bending, twisting and stretching, but because of the vibes. Women are more drawn to group fitness classes in general and to the barefoot, spa-like aesthetic of yoga in particular. So, as night follows day, dozens of brands have cropped up to serve the bougie athleisure-wearing wine mom who is yoga’s perceived consumer base, which reinforces its feminine reputation. And that is not to mention the poses themselves, which do often look most lovely when expressed in the lines of a female body — or at least, a female body that looks terrific in a pair of skin-tight pants, which just happens to be the one currently deemed most desirable by the standards du jour. Put it all together, and it’s no surprise that this spiritual practice designed for young Asian men has now transformed, in the age of influencer culture, into a contemporary showcase for Western female beauty.

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The irony is that yoga’s feminine trappings do not reflect an actual feminisation of the physical practice itself. The traditional yoga poses I teach — many of which haven’t changed for centuries — were designed with a male default in mind and require modification for female bodies, with their broader hips and lower centre of gravity. (“Hop your back foot wider!” I say, as female students struggle to square their hips in Warrior A.) Men may be intimidated (or repulsed) by yoga’s apparent incompatibility with their masculinity, but foundationally, it is still a practice ultimately made for them.

Still, if they need “Joga” — or broga, or whatever — to realise as much, it’s certainly better than the alternative: a world in which they do no yoga at all. Likewise, “bromance” — and its near sibling, the bromantic comedy — represented a silly but desperately needed correction to the notion that men couldn’t enjoy close same-sex friendships without there being something a little bit gay about them. In some senses, this yoga rebrand is just another example of the practice’s infinite capacity to be modified so that people with different bodies, different backgrounds and different limitations can access it.

Here’s something interesting, though: in recent years, as yoga has become synonymous with a particular brand of Western womanhood, it has also become a magnet for cancellation. In public op-eds and private Facebook groups, the yoga world’s self-appointed culture police are eternally wringing their hands over the “colonisation” of yoga by Westerners, or the scourge of those high-end leggings, or the permissibility of “namaslay” shirts. After all, any activity that reliably brings together a bunch of upper-middle-class white women in a single room must be problematic. About the emergence of male-dominated Joga, meanwhile, there has not been so much as a peep.

It wasn’t the mercurial, ADHD-fuelled writing style, which somehow still manages to tease a bright narrative line out of the chaos. It wasn’t the harrowing details of the two years the author spent in the notorious Nineties CEDU boarding school system for troubled teens. It’s that the book is trend-buckingly unapologetic. There is no privilege-acknowledging. There is no self-flagellating liberal guilt. There is one trigger warning, but in context it functions more like a titillating anticipatory pause than a chance to avoid upsetting content. After all, what reader of Paris: The Memoir is going to set the book aside just when she’s getting to the juiciest part of her traumatic origin story?

It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. It’s got to the point when writers insert privilege disclaimers reflexively, including in contexts where they don’t make sense and aren’t even necessarily true. (“My house burned down and somebody murdered my cat — but as a cis, straight, able-bodied white woman, I’ll never know what it means to really suffer.”) I understand why people do this, of course; if you don’t call out your own privilege, you run the risk of someone far more unhinged and vindictive doing it for you. I just didn’t realise how refreshing it would be for a writer to just… not.

In the few places in the book where the word does appear, it tends to have a very different meaning. In the CEDU facilities where Paris was confined for two years in her teens, it was a “privilege” to contact your family, to wear shoes, to sleep on a bed instead of a bare mattress in the hallway. Said privileges would be revoked for violations of the facility’s rules, which were both so numerous and so intentionally self-contradictory that it was impossible not to break them. In short, the abuse that occurred at these places, which multiple lawsuits have alleged functioned more like private prisons than schools, is nothing short of horrific — residents were forcibly medicated, ritualistically humiliated in group struggle sessions, beaten and sexually assaulted, stripped naked and left in solitary confinement for up to 20 hours at a time. And the teens destined for them were the last to know what was happening: standard intake protocol was for members of the CEDU security team to snatch them out of bed in the middle of the night.

Since 2020, when she first shared this story in the documentary This Is Paris, Hilton has been part of a survivors’ movement that calls for CEDU facilities to be shut down. The sections of her memoir detailing her treatment there read like equal parts exposé and survival thriller. But here, too, the book takes an unexpected turn. Paris Hilton isn’t sorry for her privilege, but she isn’t sorry for herself, either. In a world where so much cultural currency resides in narratives of victimisation and oppression, she chooses again to just… not.

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This is striking, juxtaposed with another recent memoir by a certain individual born into breathtaking wealth and status. Consider Paris’s tone when reflecting on how her time at Provo, Utah’s CEDU facility, left her not only traumatised, but completely lacking the education of a normal person her age:

This whole shit storm had stolen two years from me, and that’s like—what is that? Like 10 percent of my life at the time? No! More like 20 percent, isn’t it? Because, like, two years would be a fifth of your life if you’re twenty, and I was only eighteen, so—ugh. Forget it. I can’t do math. Math got robbed from me, along with geography, algebra, socialisation, healthy flirtation, how to conduct my body and value my soul.

Now compare it with Prince Harry, bewailing that he’d been cut off financially by his father at the tender age of 34:

Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf.

Both passages embody a peculiar type of celebrity: fame was guaranteed long before they did anything attention-worthy in their own right. Both were notoriously troubled teens who responded to the pressures of a privileged upbringing by rebelling, often as publicly and messily as possible, secure in the knowledge that they were too well-protected to be left with nothing. Both, too, experienced genuine trauma in their lives, the pain of which no amount of money could soften.

And yet, if someone had said 10 years ago that only one of these people would ultimately build a multimillion-dollar brand on the foundation of his or her victimhood — and make a spectacle of renouncing his or her famous family while continuing to capitalise on it at every turn — who’d have guessed it would be the Prince?

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Perhaps we might disagree on who has the greater claim to family grievance: the motherless royal who chose to renounce his role in the family, and wound up renounced by them in return; or the heiress whose complicated relationship with the parents who sent her away doesn’t stop her from citing the family name among her list of assets. (It is worth noting here that Harry, though he has made headlines by acknowledging his white male privilege, always somehow seems to avoid mentioning the part where being born royal and astronomically wealthy was surely a greater advantage. He also has the word “PRINCE” emblazoned on its cover in an exceptionally large font.) But the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

The difference in their attitudes, meanwhile, is vast. After returning to her parents’ home from the lockdown facility, a 19-year-old Paris stays up at night, unable to sleep in the room from which she was abducted at the age of 16, listing “ways to make money and leverage the assets no one could take from me: my face, my name, my legs, modelling contacts, and experience on the runway — none of which would mean anything if I wasn’t willing to work hard”. Harry, a married father in his thirties, also stays up at night — raging at the injustice of having to navigate the adult world, for which he is woefully unprepared in a way that neither the press nor his family seem to appreciate. He laments having been cruelly robbed, by his royal upbringing, of formative experiences such as carrying cash, riding the subway, or (yes, really) receiving boxes from Amazon: “After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilised, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature?”

The two approaches make for a study in what each author evidently perceives as his or her most winning public relations strategy. Harry’s brand is a sob story, wrapped in a privilege acknowledgment, stuffed into Oprah’s mailbox. He is undiscerning in the details he shares. Paris’s is a more carefully choreographed airing of dirty laundry, offering front-row seats for the press. Unlike Harry, Paris is under no illusions as to the symbiotic nature of the relationship between herself and the media. They exploit her, but she exploits them, too, often beating them at their own game. As harrowing as the boarding school stories are, the more radical — and revealing — part of this memoir is the frankness with which she describes a lifetime of living in front of the cameras, for better and for worse.

Her humanity, the real person behind the public figure, comes through in unexpected flashes, as when she describes putting her own body between a mini-dress-wearing Britney Spears and the hovering paparazzi as the pop star climbed into a car, shielding her in the vulnerable moment when a photographer might have captured an upskirt shot. But what also comes through is how savvy Hilton has always been about how much she controls the narrative when it comes to her family’s public face — how much she is its public face.

When her parents come to visit her at the Provo boarding school just a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday, she hisses a promise in her father’s ear: if he makes her stay at the facility until she’s reached legal adulthood, her first stop after they let her out will be the offices of the Wall Street Journal, where she’ll tell the press exactly what they’ve been doing to her — what her parents paid them to do. After years of refusing to believe their daughter when she said she was being abused at Provo, what does it say about the Hiltons that this was the one utterance they took seriously? (Paris was released shortly thereafter.) And what does it say about Paris that, despite her threat — and despite the obvious cachet of having been so sensationally mistreated — it took decades before she made this story public?

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I came of age at the same time as Paris Hilton — she is almost exactly one year older than me — and it’s tempting, having read this memoir, to indulge in a little self-flagellation of my own. I remember laughing along with everyone else when Sarah Silverman, at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, joked with gleeful malice about Hilton’s upcoming stint in jail. I remember rolling my eyes at The Simple Life, the reality TV show that featured Paris and Nicole Richie struggling their way through menial, low-paying jobs as janitors, farmhands, camp counsellors. Of course, there was no way of knowing at the time how much of The Simple Life was pure performance (apart from the strip searches and struggle sessions, Provo’s preferred method of character-building was to make the residents haul rocks), or that Paris’s widely-mocked breakdown over being sentenced to jail stemmed from genuine PTSD. But the mix of sneering contempt and total incuriosity with which she was treated: that was a choice.

It seems incredible that the media hasn’t jumped at the chance to recontextualise what they did to Paris Hilton in the same way that they’ve done with Britney Spears — which is to say, to shamelessly march out all their most exploitative coverage for a documentary re-airing, under the nearly transparent pretence of repenting for their sins. And yet, the response to Paris’s latest offering has been, at best, only marginally less sneering than usual.

Maybe it’s because there never was a meltdown, or a breakdown, or a tearful sit down with Oprah that made Paris seem like a person it was possible to feel sorry for. Or maybe it’s just the same old cynicism: who is to say that this isn’t just another example of Hilton’s uncanny capacity for controlling the narrative, even as she appears to be making herself vulnerable? If a person is both incredibly calculating and also incredibly honest about it, does that make her more trustworthy, or less? When she forgives her parents for sending her away, is it because she really forgives them? Or has she simply concluded — as Prince Harry must have when he decided to christen his daughter a Princess — that her family is a greater asset to her than renouncing all its privileges could ever be?

The loss caused friction among his relations, but at least it fitted the family history. In 1947, Eugene’s dad had won big on the lottery. However, in August of that month, the Romanian government, with no prior announcement, replaced the currency. 20,000 old lei were suddenly worth a single new leu. A low limit was imposed on the amount it was possible to exchange. The name of this policy was the Great Stabilisation. It made Eugene’s dad the owner of an enormous pile of worthless banknotes.

Luck attends our sense of most events of consequence. The stories of whole families might be told through it. Only matters of complete indifference seem untouched. And yet, it’s very easy to argue it out of existence. Luck might best be seen as a fiction we inhabit because we don’t like the idea that many events in the universe are random. We’re attached to the idea of our own agency and merit. We also love patterns — an instinct of immense evolutionary value that leads us to see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or believe that if a roulette ball has landed on red ten times in a row, it’s more likely to hit black on the eleventh.

This is the ground of What are the Chances, a new book by the psychology and neuroscience professor Barbara Blatchley. One of Blatchley’s most persuasive arguments is that we are pretty loose and inconsistent with the language we use when we evoke the idea of luck. We confuse fate (which implies a universe in which invisible forces have determined everything in advance) with destiny (a concept with more room for human agency) and chance (which is beyond the control of gods or humans). But in our daily lives, none of this seems to matter much, because such thinking is usually the means to an end: “We look for the cause behind even the most mundane of events,” writes Blatchley, “because feeling as though we know why something happened helps us feel in control of that thing and, by extension, of the universe itself.”

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To see this in action, watch a quiz show. On an edition of Pointless a couple of weeks ago, a financial consultant called Helen knocked herself out of the quiz by declaring that Kat Slater in EastEnders was played by an actor called Jessie Williams. The totemic scoreboard gave its dreaded red negative twitch. “Very, very unlucky,” sighed Richard Osman, as he revealed that the correct answer was in fact Jessie Wallace.

But unless she had fallen under the influence of some invisible force that erases soap facts from the heads of random victims, Helen had not been unlucky. She had simply been wrong. Her knowledge of Queen Vic landladies was inadequate to the demands of the game. Should Osman have put it in these terms? Absolutely not. It would have been fatal to the pleasures of his own show. A game of skill that has no language of luck is no game at all.

It’s also harder to win. The former cricketer Ed Smith, who wrote Luck: What It Means and Why It Matters (2012), was once part of a team that decided it would abolish such consoling words and stop ascribing human fault to the imagined influence of cosmic forces. It took six weeks at the bottom of the results table to reverse the policy. Sometimes magical thinking gets magical results.

But what about games with higher stakes than Pointless, or Kent vs Middlesex? An attractively round 50 years ago, the philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice (1971), one of the few works of political philosophy to be adapted as a stage musical. The lottery was an important metaphor for Rawls. For him, life issued us with two tickets at birth. One for the natural lottery, in which the prize is a biological potential inherited from our parents. One for the social lottery, in which winners emerge from the womb into highly favourable material, social and political circumstances. Like all true examples of luck, these advantages have no dimension of desert or merit. Luck is unearned.

We can all think of figures in public life — dynastic columnists, aristocratic models, the progeny of 60s rock stars who clutter up ES Magazine — who owe at least part of their success to early receipt of a Rawlsian Thunderball. And in experimental situations, as in life, recipients of this good fortune do not always perceive their privilege. A famous study at Stanford University set up games of Monopoly in which one player took a double salary and rolled with two dice instead of one: winners failed to acknowledge their unfair advantage and reported that they had triumphed through merit.

I don’t much like Monopoly, but I do play the National Lottery. Since Covid came, I’ve bought tickets more frequently. I always let the app choose the numbers, because the pure aleatory nature of the process seems both the point and the pleasure. I’d never dream of gambling in anything where knowledge, skill or judgement plays a part. (If, like Sid James and Hattie Jacques in Carry On at Your Convenience, I owned an occult budgie that tweeted on hearing the winner of the 2.30 at Newmarket, I’d consider the bet a fraud on the bookie.)

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The National Lottery is sometimes called a tax on stupidity — mainly by people who regard themselves as clever, many of whom wrongly attribute the thought to Voltaire. The seventeenth-century economist William Petty is a better source. In his 1662 Treatise of Taxes and Contributions he wrote that “a Lottery … is properly a Tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools.” (Thank you, QI elves.) But there are more accurate and less snobbish ways of describing its community of players.

A 2009 study by the ecumenical Christian think-tank Theos found that employed professionals spent around £40 a year on the lottery, £30 a year less than manual workers. Benefit claimants were the most prodigious buyers of scratch cards, and the lowest earners — those on £15k–20k per year — were laying out almost a week’s earnings on tickets for the main draw. Theos hasn’t updated these findings, but suspects, as scratch card sales have climbed and draw tickets fallen, that the Lottery now “leans ever more on sales to lower income players”. Camelot has produced no data to contradict this.

If the lottery is a tax, it is a tax on poverty. Those who pay it do not do so because they lack knowledge or are guilty of some kind of cognitive error. A person spending £1.50 of their £86 Universal Credit on a ticket knows what proportion of their income this represents. That money, however, purchases something powerful. Participation in a game that makes Rawls’s lotteries irrelevant. If, to choose a not particularly random example, David Cameron buys a ticket for the Set for Life draw, he is no more likely to win than anyone else.

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The machine that reduces an ordered stack of National Lottery balls to a random field of tumbling atoms is called Excalibur. This is one of Barbara Blatchley’s conceptual confusions. Excalibur, as any viewer Monty Python and the Holy Grail will know, is a sword of fate or destiny, not chance. The film’s group of soil-eating anarcho-syndicalists would see the contradiction. When one (played by Michael Palin) tells Graham Chapman’s King Arthur that “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,” he is objecting to two things: a society in which outcomes are predetermined by supernatural forces, and one in which wealth and power are largely inherited. There would be less inequality in a world where mud-eaters were as likely to receive a magical sword as a royal figure who has an ancestral supply of ham and jam and Spam. (You might remember that this conversation ends with Graham Chapman attempting to beat Michael Palin to the ground.)

Most attempts to reduce economic inequality accept the results of Rawls’s social lottery and then try to ameliorate their effects. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever suggested working towards the same end by harnessing the power of chance. A massive increase in inheritance tax, for instance, which could be funnelled into the National Lottery, distributing unearned wealth randomly through the population. Having lost — again — on my most recent ticket, I’d be happy to consider it. We could call it the Great Stabilisation.

It isn’t just the ease of international travel that makes Eat, Pray, Love seem like a document from another era. It’s also the book’s unselfconsciousness about economic inequality — about the fact that you can only have this sort of adventure when you happen to have received, say, a $200,000 book advance. And if the book was “a voyage of self-discovery” (a phrase Gilbert used with hardly a trace of irony), it was also an ode to consumerism: the dream held out by travel agents — sunshine, hedonism and enlightenment rolled into one — has rarely found a more persuasive salesperson.

And yet for all that, Eat, Pray, Love possessed a kind of absurd magnificence. At the start of the book, Gilbert’s marriage is in crisis, and as she collapses onto her bathroom floor at 3am, sobbing uncontrollably, something wholly unexpected happens, like “one of those crazy astronomical super-events when a planet flips over in outer space for no reason whatsoever, and its molten core shifts”. For the first time in her life, she finds herself crying out, in fear, in desperation, in hope, to the creator of the universe.

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What happens next isn’t quite Augustine’s Confessions. But there was an appealing sense in Eat, Pray, Love — a sense never quite lost even as Gilbert moved relentlessly onwards through the world’s finest gelaterias, yoga studios and beach bars, distributing her publisher’s vast wads of cash — that life itself is a stupendous gift. You have a body, so feast! You have a soul, so how could you possibly spend less than four months on trying to unlock the mystery of prayer? You have the capacity to love, so why not travel halfway around the planet for it?

Fiffeen years on, self-help has become a far more sensible affair. Or rather, it has been supplanted by “self-care” — those miniature, fine-tuned adjustments to soothe you through a demanding day. Instead of going on a voyage of self-discovery, people download mindfulness apps called things like “Ten Per Cent Happier”. Whereas Elizabeth Gilbert searched for a God who is “an experience of supreme love”, we have Marie Kondo telling us to throw more stuff away and Sarah Knight offering The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F***. The new mood was anticipated by the ironic subtitle of Oliver Burkeman’s 2011 post-self-help book Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done.

To the generation which has acquired its disposable income since Eat, Pray, Love appeared, Gilbert’s scheme must appear pretty dubious. Eat? No thanks — I’m fine with this kale juice. Love? Not likely: according to a recent survey, 20- and 30-something travellers “would rather improve mental health (30%), learn a new skill (29%) or get fit (24%) than find love (12%).” Pray? Well, in the next few weeks a book will be published which is in certain ways the opposite of Eat, Pray, Love.

True, Sarah Sands’ The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life would also cost a fair amount to emulate: flights to Japan aren’t cheap, and nor, one imagines, is a stay at a Buddhist monastery in Koyasan. For Sands’ other nine lessons she visits religious houses of various, mostly Christian traditions in Italy, Spain, Egypt, Bhutan, France, Germany and Greece — and, as lockdown restrictions start to bite during the writing of the book, in Britain too. Even so, Interior Silence is less an extravagant journey in pursuit of sublime knowledge, more an accumulation of useful habits to help stay afloat.

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From the harmony of the Japanese monastery, Sands concludes that tidying her handbag could be the key to a more ordered life. At the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque, she discovers that giving up caffeine and alcohol “brings a quietness of mind”. Sands’ monks and nuns teach her to ignore the news cycle, to practise patience, to enjoy simplicity. These are the small, familiar steps of self-care — and it’s not entirely clear how much Sands’ newfound tranquillity is the result of drinking deep from the wells of ancient knowledge, and how much it is just the usual effect of a really nice holiday.

Nevertheless, the book is gripping, both because of Sands’ witty, sometimes poignant prose, and as a fable of our times. In the 21st-century meritocracy, whose greatest prize is to have a fun, well-paid job which impresses strangers at social events, Sands is unquestionably one of the winners. As editor of the Evening Standard from 2012-17, she spends “every evening in theatres or restaurants or at parties” — some of them at the proprietor Evgeny Lebedev’s Umbrian castle:

It was my job as editor of the London newspaper to deliver Boris Johnson to these weekends. The preparations were elaborate, and our welcoming party would breathe more deeply when our cars finally accelerated up the avenue of cypresses, taking in the jasmine air, and preparing for a weekend of medieval splendour: feasting, dancing, boar hunting. I have a memory of a dishevelled Johnson chasing Evgeny’s wolf, also named Boris, because it had eaten his computer dongle.

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Then, as editor of the Today Programme, Sands covers the edge-of-your-seat drama of post-Brexit politics, rising at 4.30 to “a frenzy of news wires and Twitter”, only returning home in the evening to catch up on emails. And how does it feel, this thrilling life at the centre of glamorous invite-only occasions and world-shaking political stories? Terrible, of course. The news becomes a numbing addiction. Sands’ mind fills with “noise, chaos and anxiety” to the point where she struggles to sleep. And then, among monks and nuns, she realises that with their lack of ambition, their small needs and simple lives, these people seem to have found happiness.

At moments, Sands hints that monastic living may have more to teach us than just some novel approaches to self-care. The book circles around the possibility of divine revelation, without quite deciding what to make of it. Sands quotes a phrase from St Thomas Aquinas, “the light of faith”, but doesn’t mention that he tends to use it in a fairly blunt way: by that light, he comments, “the human mind is directed to assent to such things as are becoming to a right faith, and not to assent to others.” Sands adopts a very different tone, as she looks out onto the old convent wall at the bottom of her garden:

I think of what St Thomas once called “the light of faith”. If there is a divine truth beyond knowledge and reason, then my wall, bright behind the silhouette of the yew tree and the big dark sky, seems a testament to it.

Like Eat, Pray, Love, Interior Silence is haunted by the possibility of finding God. But here the possibility fades away into a beautiful image, just as in the earlier book it dissolved into a consumerist paradise. Perhaps there are some questions which the self-help genre just isn’t designed to answer.

Black Britons and poor Britons have suffered the most. This could be a propensity of the Coronavirus, but it might simply be a function of the contemporary United Kingdom, where living in the richest areas of the country buys you almost 19 more years of life than if you lived in the most deprived. If the Victorian researcher Charles Booth were to rise from the grave to draw us some new poverty maps, he’d still need all those different coloured inks.

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By Saloni Dattani

One ailment, though, maintains a reputation for discriminating against the wealthy. Gout makes big toes swell painfully and cartoonishly. It causes chalky nodules called tophi — often compared to crustacean eyes — to balloon from knees and knuckles. It hurts. (“Like walking on my eyeballs,” reported the Regency cleric and humourist Sydney Smith.) The condition occurs when excessive amounts of uric acid in the blood cause crystalline needles of salt to gather in the joints and surrounding tissues. Its raw materials are purines — chemical compounds thickly concentrated in seafood, meat and alcohol — which helps to explain why gout gained its status as “the disease of kings.”

“Gout,” concluded Thomas Sydenham, one of the founders of British clinical medicine, “kills more rich men than poor, more wise than simple.”

Three centuries later, that’s no longer the case. The last big British study found that prevalence of gout in the population had increased by over 60% between 1997 and 2012. (Wales and the north-east of England were particularly afflicted.) In US, the “gout therapeutic market” is valued at $1847m, and a report released last month projected it might reach $3820m by 2027.

Thomas Sydenham might have looked at these figures and seen a strange and painful kind of social progress; a pathological levelling-up. In his day, only the wealthy could afford to surfeit on lampreys, pate and port. Perhaps, in 202o, cheap meat, cheap booze, the Iceland prawn ring and the two-metre long Aldi pig-in-a-blanket have made gout a disease to which anyone can aspire.

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Let food bank clients eat cake

By Matthew Sweet

The history of gout is as much about culture and class and morals as medicine. It’s a deep and uncomfortable history. Papyri discovered in the 1910s showed that the Egyptians had identified the condition by 2640 BC. In the 5th century BC, the physician Hippocrates referred to it as “the walking disease”. The name by which we know it calls back to the humoral theories of human biology that persisted from Ancient Greece to the early modern period. It comes from the Latin gutta (“drop”), and was first recorded by the 13th century by the French historian Geoffroi de Villehardouin, who asserted that the crusader Hugh IV of Saint-Pol had expired at Constantinople in 1205 because too much fluid — black bile, yellow bile, or phlegm — had spilled down into his legs.

Despite such horrors, gout conferred a kind of blessing. It was rarely fatal, and its presence in the body was thought to keep other, more deadly conditions at bay. “It prevents other illnesses and prolongs life,” argued Horace Walpole, “Could I cure the gout, should not I have a fever, a palsy, or an apoplexy?”

Surprisingly, for a condition that can turn your joints into throbbing satsumas of flesh, it was even considered sexy. Gout talk added a frisson to Benjamin Franklin’s flirty correspondence with Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy, a married harpsichordist he met in Paris in 1777. Franklin teased Brillon that had they consummated their relationship, his feet might be less painful in the night. (“If the ladies at Passy had more of that Christian charity which I have so often recommended to you, in vain, I would not have the gout now.”) She responded with a poem proposing the opposite: a man with “a pretty Mistress” — or two, or three, of four — was more likely to suffer. Franklin’s reply was to stay up late writing a short two-handed comedy in which the personification of his condition, Madame Gout, visits him in his chamber, rather as Fortune visits Boethius in Consolations of Philosophy.

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By GAVANNDRA HODGE

Novelists and politicians no longer feel the compulsion to turn their uric tortures into light literature. Despite the rise in cases, the discourse of gout has all but disappeared. And yet, the moral ideas that have circulated it since ancient times — its association with excess and indulgence — are still legible. They’re there, for instance, in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2018 film The Favourite, in which the agonies suffered by Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne are attributable to her predilection for self-pity and stuffing herself with massive slices of cake. We see her engorged legs swaddled and smeared in therapeutic unguents. (We’re not told what these are, but one traditional remedy is advised: “Roast a fat old goose and stuff with chopped kittens, lard, incense, wax and flour of rye. This must all be eaten, and the dripping applied to the painful joints.”)

The outgoing Republican administration, though, should be given some credit for reviving gout as a moral metaphor — via the story of Paul Manafort, the disgraced chair of Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Manafort was convicted in August 2018 for lying his way to securing bank loans and evading taxes on the $16 million he earned as a lobbyist for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. His trial produced evidence of a fraud-funded life of eye-watering excess. His $15,000 ostrich-leather bomber jacket became a court exhibit. “The gluttony,” reflected the fashion critic of the Washington Post. “The indulgence. The preening bad taste.”

When he appeared for sentencing in October, he rolled into court in a wheelchair. His body was clad in a green prison jumpsuit labelled “ALEXANDRIA INMATE”, but his right foot was wrapped in bandages. His attorneys used his gout diagnosis as part of a plea for mercy. The judge, passing sentence the following March, was unmoved. “It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved,” said US district judge Amy Berman Jackson. Manafort’s lies to Congress and to the American people, she observed, were perpetrated “not to support a family, but to sustain a lifestyle that was ostentatiously opulent and extravagantly lavish – more houses than a family can enjoy, more suits than one man can wear”.

Manafort sat in his wheelchair and listened in silence to the judgement. He wore a sober suit. His right foot remained bandaged. Its swollen condition became part of the story. Gout as an indicator of corruption? Gout as karma, perhaps?

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Too easy. Too satisfying. Champagne and foie gras can exacerbate an attack of gout, but if Manafort is a typical case, his condition is probably genetic. People who live on nut loaf and tap water are not immune and know its nocturnal agonies. The rise in gout’s prevalence in the UK and the US can’t be mapped onto any growth in the sale of purine-rich luxuries. Something more complex is happening.

Obesity is rising. The population is ageing. There are more people alive today in gout’s high-risk groups than there were in the days of Sydenham and Walpole. Let the law punish Paul Manafort, not the cultural backstory of the uric crystals giving his foot the Little Mermaid treatment. And let it bring justice for those others, too, who are enduring illness associated not with privilege, but its opposite.

So our rebellion, to the extent that it wasn’t just about smoking grass and listening to the Grateful Dead, tended to be about class and class guilt. Like Malcolm McDowell in the 1968 public school revolution fantasy film if…., we were on the Left. We spoke with mockney accents; one of my friends became a skinhead and slipped away to Stamford Bridge every other Saturday.

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By Sam Leith

Today’s elite public school radicalism is a very different animal. The schools no longer think of themselves as conservative institutions training a ruling class to preserve a national heritage — they are now academic forcing houses attracting and producing a global elite of the “brightest and best”. They think of themselves as academic meritocracies, albeit with a bias towards the affluent, and are often in the vanguard of the most fashionable pedagogical and social trends.

Contemporary race- and gender- based progressivism is therefore no threat at all to the people running the schools, indeed it is positively welcomed by them. One can observe this in the kerfuffle surrounding the Eton master who has been sacked for explaining, and at least partially defending, the concept of patriarchy — it was the Eton authorities who intervened, not an uprising of radical pupils, and some parents and pupils have actually been protesting against the sacking. But in my experience of speaking at London private day schools and knowing plenty of young people who have emerged from them in recent years, progressive groupthink is the norm.

I recently stumbled across an example of this in the alumni magazine of St Paul’s, another elite private school. It featured an interview with former pupil Jonah Freud, who has recently launched a petition to “Decolonise St Paul’s” that has been signed by more than 1,000 current and former students. The letter calls for “educating through a global, rather than eurocentric, curriculum” and “deconstructing the racist fabric of our society”. Jonah, who studied Race and Pop Music at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualised Study, is the son of Matthew Freud, grandson of Clement, himself the grandson of Sigmund. Interviewer Tom Adeyoola writes of the moment Freud was awakened:

“For someone already ‘woke’ it was something closer to home that compelled him to action in writing to St Paul’s; the similarity between the names of George Floyd and his older brother George Freud. In his own words, ‘I have never experienced anything of the fear that George Floyd’s family would have feared and the only reason for that is that I am white.'”

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By Alex Renton

I don’t want to sound cynical about this; it is obviously a welcome development that young men and women, many of whom will graduate to important jobs in our society, have egalitarian instincts and are aware of their privileges. But what about the most important privilege of all: their parents’ wealth? It is rather morally convenient for them to believe passionately in every kind of equality except economic equality.

Perhaps at some unconscious level the elite progressive public school authorities and pupils feel they will get a free pass for their huge financial advantages, if only they shout loudly enough about how they are challenging all other kinds. And as the conformist young progressives agonise about their white privilege it is rather handy that this places them in the same boat as lower income white people in struggling post-industrial towns. If both groups are primarily privileged by their race, the heads of Eton and St Paul’s can with a clear conscience complain about anti-public school bias when Oxford and Cambridge colleges try to raise their quota of people from such low income backgrounds.

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What we meritocracy critics get wrong

By David Goodhart

“If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” said Theresa May in 2017. It was a clumsily expressed sentiment. But isn’t this exactly what she was talking about? A financial and educational elite, including significant sections of big business, who are increasingly disconnected from the feelings and interests of the rest of the country yet regard themselves as leading the struggle for human progress.

Shaun Bailey, the Tory London mayoral candidate, talks about tackling black disadvantage and widening access to the elite as a means of strengthening the national “team”. This is the kind of language that people of all races can happily support; but a worrying aspect of the BLM protests earlier in the year was how it divided the country, between a big section of the white elite — who embraced it enthusiastically — and the white provincial majority who seemed to be looking on with some scepticism.

Surely, if elite public schools do have any justification in a modern liberal democracy, it is precisely that the people who run them are teaching their privileged pupils to think clearly, honestly and independently about social (and other) problems, not egging them on to embrace the latest fashionable cause. As the greatest of 20th century Etonians, George Orwell, put it: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Swire is professionally thwarted and angrier than she pretends: she obviously wanted to be a cabinet minister but instead is a superb diarist who has written a betrayal, as superb diarists do.  Swire is self-pitying, and this book might serve as a homily on how not to marry your way to happiness, but to work for it.  It would certainly suit her Thatcherite credentials — she is the daughter of Sir John Nott, Margaret Thatcher’s defence secretary. Did she marry Sir Hugo Swire, who is stupider — and nicer — than her, by mistake? (A typical Swire line is: “I can’t kill a pet, it’s not in me”). She doesn’t say: betrayal will only extend so far. She alludes to a marital crisis, and Samantha Cameron dried her tears, but she doesn’t tell us exactly what happened, as Alan Clark would have done. I also sense a thumping crush on Call Me Dave, which may explain her hurry to include his comment about toppling her into a Cornish bush to “give her one”. (That is the scoop here. She was formerly a journalist, as Amiel was: surely there is more?)

It would have been a better — and more moral book — if she had been honest. She prides herself on her political nous, telling her husband how to strategise, and he duly sags, like a coat — but she doesn’t care about the country her set is governing. Both these books are immune to those beyond the elites. Swire’s primary resentment is that her father did not get a peerage. Her secondary resentment is that her husband didn’t get a peerage. Nor did he make the cabinet, due to what Swire thinks is positive discrimination: there were already too many old Etonians in the cabinet.

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But she doesn’t really have political convictions. She has self-interest. I think she inserted passages to make herself more sympathetic because they do not read like contemporaneous notes; and it is obviously a lie that she didn’t write this book for publication. A passage about Michael Gove’s “geeky-smart” son chatting to Swire is cut off with the words “which would be unfair to repeat here”. Eh? Isn’t this your secret diary? If you are interested in political gossip — and this book confirms things but does not expose them — it is gripping because betrayal is always gripping. Cameron comes out well, but he was never a deceiver. He likes himself too much. The fact that he was photographed in his ludicrous shepherd’s hut at the request of the joiner who built is probably the last word on that.

Amiel is a different thing: an outsider. She was born in Watford, her father committed suicide when she was 15, and her mother, who hated her, didn’t tell her about his death until years later. Amiel’s love for her father is her touchstone: I’m not surprised she has dramatic relationships with men. She left home at 15 too because her sister would try to kill herself when she was around; her family treated her like the ghost-child in The Ring, then. When her mother chucked her out, she lived on her wits in Toronto: shoplifting; hanging out with Leonard Cohen; being beautiful, a curse for the emotionally untethered woman, and getting engaged to the first Jew she met, because she thought she might be a bourgeois housewife.

The most interesting fact — the one that makes this incoherent book make sense — leaks out without self-understanding: she is addicted to codeine. Codeine is a painkiller; an anaesthetic. Amiel writes from inside the addiction — she could hardly not — and that gives the prose an unbalanced quality, which echoes the effects of drug addiction. She is hyper-sensitive and numb by turns; both milk and stone.

Most reviewers have called the book funny. What they mean is that Amiel, unlike Swire, cannot edit herself: that is the drugs. So, she relates how she sullenly performed fellatio on the publisher George Weidenfeld, who introduced her to society in return; that she followed a man home and his dog licked cream off her; that she brutally assaulted her own dog and does not know why (it was anger, I think, because this dog loved her); that her third husband encouraged her to take her own life. Black though, she adores: he represents the security and status that her childhood denied her, and she is loyal to that. She buys him new clothes: a Jewish wife at last. She treated the status as a drug, exactly: she went mad with it; she didn’t enjoy it; and it ruined her.

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Her adventures with the Park Avenue hags practising competitive couture are painful to read if, like me, you like Amiel the untethered, because you can only think: what happened to the hack? She was more interesting when she lived in studio flats and drank Carnation Milk. She found the hags terrifying: “Those dreadful lesbian suits,” asks one of Saint Laurent couture, “why do you buy them?” When Conrad fell they fled of course, because they were only ever friends with the money; as Swire was only friends with the power.

Barbara and Conrad became something very small — “wounded snails” — though Conrad Snail did publish his life of Franklin D Roosevelt. She felt the loss of status keenly: “I had stardust, that ephemeral something that denies explanation, but not enough.” Then she compares herself to a Monarch butterfly — a queen in flight, but small again. I think the rage in this book is almost entirely self-hatred, and the rest is her tribute to Black, who saved her as much as he could.

Swire says too little for fine literature and Amiel too much, but if you resent the rich, all of whom have as little concern for the world beyond as you would imagine, these books will feed your every prejudice. You might feel a little pity too, for something worthless lost.

There are, of course, hierarchies of privilege, something we learn from the earliest days at school. Although I don’t recall there being any permissible prejudice against anyone because of the colour of their skin at my state primary, other groups were not so lucky. Throughout my schooling, aside from an intense antagonism towards gays — this was the 90s — there was a vast amount of opposition to people with ginger hair, ‘othered’ to such an extent that redheads were defined by nothing but their hair colour and were bullied accordingly. Yet even this was obviously minor compared to the real matter of privilege, which only expressed itself after we left education.

At this point, as we all struggled to find work and somewhere to live, one group of people were fortunate above all others — those who, fresh out of university, were able to put down a deposit on a flat in London straight away, rather than spend years in rented accommodation, seeing most of their salaries disappear each month into someone else’s pocket. It was not only that this was a divide between renting and owning — having a stake in a property or paying for someone else’s stake in it — but that it had serious knock-on effects down the line.

People who owned a place of their own in the capital had a wider and more appealing choice of jobs that they could go into — not because they were any more brilliant, had better CVs or any particular skin colour or hair colour. In contrast those forced to rent had to take whatever work was available in order to paddle fast enough not to sink in the big city and thus boomerang — fear of all fears — back to their parents’ home.

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Many of the most desirable, hard-to-get-into, careers went to this former group of people. To take just the most high-profile example, many if not most of the people in my generation who made a stab at acting — whether successful or not — were able to make that attempt because their parents had helped to buy them a property, house them in the capital, or otherwise keep them financially afloat.

Of those who did succeed in that profession I can think of any number of people at least as talented as them, if not more so, who would have been just as likely to succeed but who never had the opportunity to give it a shot. Now you could say that if they had really wanted it, and fought for it, and stacked shelves at night while doing endless read-throughs during the day, then they could have managed it.

Perhaps. There are always exceptional and exceptionally motivated people who make the exceptions, but in most cases that is not how things work. And it has got bigger, this privilege divide, since I left university. This explains why so many professions, not just acting but also the media, have become dominated by the ‘privileged’, where once the working class were well-represented.

And this divide does neatly map onto class far more than any other ‘characteristic’. I can think of black friends and contemporaries who had families able to help them onto the property ladder, and white friends and contemporaries who did not. The same can be said for gays (or members of the LGBT community, one should now say) and even gingers. I can think of people who would now be called BAME whose families were able to relieve them of the pressure of ever having to make the rent.

And I can think of many people from what is now being called (somewhat sinisterly to my ears) the ‘white community’ who never had that luck and struggled along in jobs they hated, paying most of their wages into accommodation they disliked.

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Why I won't 'take the knee'

By Douglas Murray

One thing that is so striking about the ‘privilege’ discussion of recent years is the way in which it has come to be interested only in a very specific set of issues. It is utterly obsessed with what it deems ‘racial privilege’, insofar as it is obsessed with ‘white privilege’. As a secondary order of duty it is interested in the privilege alleged to be withheld from people who are not male or heterosexual.

Yet in my own ‘lived experience’ (to steal that typically grandiose and tautologous phrase of the social justice warriors) parental-housing-ladder-help [PHLH] privilege seems to me the most significant privilege variant among my contemporaries.

So, since we live in an era which has decided that a privilege found is a privilege that must be addressed, what are we to do about this one? The first step, presumably, would be to raise awareness of the issue. After having raised it, perhaps we could ask people who have PHLH privilege not just to educate themselves but also to speak more about the privilege that they have enjoyed in their lives? Perhaps that stage having been accomplished, we could move to something slightly more vindictive.

Possibly those who have benefited from PHLH privilege could be asked to put signs in their windows saying ‘Sorry’, or “This house was purchased due to unearned privilege”. I imagine that over time this could have some negative effects; shaming people in this manner might lead to them moving out to areas where there are more people like them, and fewer people willing to shame them or otherwise look down on them.

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A final stage could be to insist that all of those who enjoyed this privilege could be made to pay up — the taxation and stamp duty already levelled against them having still not levelled the divide. A great wealth transfer from those who bought their properties with parental help towards those who did not could be in order. It could prove divisive, but it could also be claimed that after this ugly but necessary episode we would live in a fairer and more equitable society.

Why do I raise this issue? Not just to point out that the privilege games we are currently playing are curiously selected, do not apply in every country all the time in the same way, and are almost certainly unequal to the task of discussing ‘inequality’ in the UK today. But also to point out that in playing this game we are doing almost everything possible to make more people unhappy.

The emerging ethic of this age tells people that they must scour the world looking for grievances to hold up; to locate power or privilege and destroy it or disperse it. But the world being what it is, and human beings being what we are, there will always be a profound number of grievances that we could find and point to. They might be said to be structural, personal, political, familial and much more. Some are just down to luck — health, wealth or good looks, and anyone who doesn’t think the latter a privilege needs to ‘educate themselves’, to use another sinister phrase of the age.

Sometimes there are injustices that we cannot allow to continue and that we can do something about — such as the treatment of some group of people as second-class citizens. But the privilege discussion now implies that once any privilege is identified it must be campaigned against and ‘dismantled’ until the playing field can be said to be levelled.

There is another solution, or at least approach, to problems that are endemic and unfair, but not oppressive. That is to try to reconcile ourselves to the world around us. To find our own attitudes towards, and ways around, inequities and inequalities that may be endemic but are also unfixable. The alternative is, at best, endless unhappiness, and at worst, something far more dangerous and divisive.

The craziest day?

I would choose the one that began with an assembly during which the chemistry master waved what he claimed was a loaded pistol. Lessons were suspended and fifth formers smoked cannabis and snogged in their hide-out overlooking the playground. The afternoon before had seen a concerted attack on a female biology teacher with Bunsen burners attached to taps and used as water cannon. I had not witnessed it because I had been suspended from the subject for suggesting insolently, in a mock O level, that the alimentary canal went from London to Liverpool and had recently been upgraded by the London to Liverpool Alimentary Canal Society.

Mr Hope, with his pistol, restored some order but Sidcot School in the summer of 1976 was not a place for the faint-hearted or the academically ambitious.

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Idiots online sometimes discover that I went to a fee-paying boarding school and write triumphant messages suggesting that I have no ability to question Tory Privilege or American Imperialism and so on, because I had such a privileged upbringing myself. The better-read of them genuinely imagine the earlier chapters of A Dance To the Music of Time: tuck boxes and wall games and fags fixing your toast.

We didn’t even have hot water. There were cockroaches in the showers that we’d douse with lighter fluid and set alight. The latrines were unheated. At meals older, stronger children took the best food. Best being a relative term: I became a vegetarian to avoid the poisonous semi-cooked sausages on which most of the school lived. When I try now to make my kids eat food marginally beyond the sell-by date they raise their eyes to the sky and mouth ‘Daddy went to boarding school’.

And yes, I did yearn for privilege: for a home that hadn’t been poisoned by mental illness, for tea and telly with Mum and Dad and a bed that wasn’t metal in a dormitory with dozens of other boys. For a life in a nice comprehensive like my wife’s former school, where all the children of the teachers at the local university formed their own cosy group and holidayed in a camper van before gliding effortlessly off to top universities. But it wasn’t to be.

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Lessons learned? Well, not the formal ones, as I have hinted. But oh so many more, so various, and so lacking from other more conventional establishments.

The first is the importance of camaraderie. At Sidcot, 360 pupils of both sexes jammed together in a collection of sheds by the A38 just south of Bristol; we cared deeply about each other. Often it was hatred. I still remember the names of some tormentors – like the psychopathic brothers whose home was rumoured to be in the Ascension Islands, who attacked younger boys with impunity for most of the decade.

But I remember, too, the intensity of the bonding – friendship is too weak a word – of kids thrown together parentless at 11, staying cooped up in the Cotswolds through thick and thin ’til leaving at 18. I remember the tears I shed the night I took a call to say my granny had died. I remember going back into prep. Carrying on. Boarding school is total immersion. There is nowhere to hide.  And when things go well, they’re intensified too: the speech competition that I would win every summer (nobody else cared) made me feel like, well, world king – a master manipulator of men, a cross between Lawrence Oliver and JFK.

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You find your place in that world and although it doesn’t have to be your place in future worlds, it helps that you know how society works and how you can fit in. Jonathan Aitken boasted that prison would be no problem for him after boarding school and he was right – not because of the hardship but because of the camaraderie and the ability of anyone who goes to boarding school to find their place, their level, their role in the organism.

It changes you. Or more precisely, it changes your brain. A growing body of neuroscience research suggests that differences in what psychologists call ‘cultural self-construal’ can result in differences in brain activation. As Bruce Hood puts it in his enthralling book Possessed: “Brain activation differs between individuals from independent and collectivist cultures when it comes to a number of tasks.”

Bingo! This is why I don’t care when other family members steal my stuff. Hood’s book doesn’t mention school but hey: Sidcot in the 1970s was the epitome of collectivism. We were all in it together. We owned nothing. So Hood would say our brains were more attuned to the collective. This absolutely allows for vertical competition – boarding schools are full of tall poppies. But their success is geared to, mixed with, the functioning of the whole body; the sense of community is not just foisted on you by lusty singing of the school song, it is actually in your head, in your brain.

This is a good thing, on balance. It allows you to understand intuitively that society does, actually, exist. And however accomplished you are, nothing of you is outside the whole.

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By Giles Fraser

Silence laced with boredom was another gift. Every week the whole school would troop into Quaker meeting. An entire hour would be spent alone with your thoughts. Even when some elderly Quaker (it was the village meeting too) took to her feet and revealed that she had been shopping that week and lost the butter before getting it home and you were waiting for the line ‘life’s a lot like that’ – even then the boredom was only marginally assuaged. It hung in the air like the dust revealed in sunlight that streamed through the windows. Nowhere to hide from the intensity of it all. The impact of this on me has been wholly positive. I am at home in silence. I have never listened to a podcast. Not even the life changing work of Giles Fraser. I seek no soundtrack, no clutter. I am self-contained. It began in Meeting.

Another lesson from the Quakers of 1970s Sidcot: when a school talks the talk about inclusion, how about walking the walk too? Sidcot took a proportion of pupils (and paid for them as they did for me) who had been expelled from all other schools. Some of them were genuinely troubled. Sometimes disruptive. But we lived with it. We lived with them. In fact, it was only in later life that I realised who they were, why their name tags were scrawled with sharpie rather than daintily printed, why they seemed to have nowhere to go in the holidays, why they left suddenly.

Social inclusion is actually that: it must mean inclusion of all of us with each other and a realisation that (when it’s done properly and funded well) all will benefit. How many modern private schools, how many state schools, desperate for results, bullied by parents wanting calm classrooms, properly cater for troubled pupils? We know the answer. It is in the news. The Quakers, for all the ghastly faults of Sidcot, knew what was right.

I suppose we have to talk about exams. And actually here I owe the Quakers a grudging vote of thanks. I was allowed to be useless. For much of my life I resented this. I wished I had been pushed. I did nothing but play table tennis and smoke Players No6 in my O level year. But the school stuck with me and when I announced that I wanted to take three A levels and go to university they rallied round.

This flexibility is the privilege of which those correspondents I mentioned at the start like to object and in that one area they have a point. All schools need to be places where we grow up. Not places where we achieve qualifications.

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My daughter is taking GCSEs this year and is being told that the difference between a 9 and an 8 matters because Michael Gove, who changed the system, thinks it reveals a truth about ability. Seriously? I admire the American system (in which my children started school while I was based there for the BBC), where you learn nothing much until you go to college. Nor are you judged and graded in public exams until you leave school. Grow up I say. Then think about other stuff. It worked (just about) for me.

I should say in fairness (and in case the Quakers employ lawyers) that nothing I have said about my school is true of the establishment in the modern age. Sidcot is by all accounts a thriving place, with good results and cheerful pupils.

The past is another country etc, and there is no country farther away (thank God) than that inhabited by children in the 1970s – at Quaker schools or any other school. I would love to say it didn’t do me any harm but, frankly, it did. And some good as well. That’s school. That’s life.

This week the game got an unwitting boost thanks to news that Meghan Markle, otherwise known as the Duchess of Sussex, has guest-edited the September edition of Vogue. The contents of the issue are perhaps unsurprising. As well as inevitably celebrating prominent women, such as the teenaged school truant Greta Thunberg, the Duchess has also set out to prove that women don’t need men to give them status. Something she has done by including an interview with her husband, Prince Harry.

This in itself has drawn a certain amount of comment, and will not have calmed fears some people had that a highly political figure marrying into the nation’s most necessarily non-politically opinionated family might cause problems down the line. The fact that Meghan Markle’s pre-Harry politics might be best described as ‘woke’ is in some ways unimportant – a prominent Donald Trump-supporting Republican marrying into the Royal Family would raise similar concerns, to say the least.

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By Peter Franklin

The worry was that Prince Harry’s marriage to Ms Markle would end up tipping him towards her political path, fears that will not have been calmed by his appearance in the high-end fashion magazine. In the royally-guest-edited issue, Prince Harry talks about a number of things, the headline-grabber being his claim that he and his wife would not have more than two children because of its impact on the environment and climate change.

It isn’t at all clear how many people in developing countries with a population boom look to the House of Windsor for guidance on child-production, but in a way this is at least familiar, soft, Royal-environmental boilerplate. The sort of thing which is allowed to be voiced by non-monarch members of the Royal Family because it is hard to object too strenuously and it causes no serious harm.

It is the Prince’s follow-up comments, however, that dish up the problem, less for his audience than for the Prince himself. Watching Prince Harry beginning to play the game of identifying ‘unconscious bias’ is like gazing at a hapless amateur juggling with loaded pistols; it is enough to make any well-disposed person want to scream “Stop” and seize the guns from his unsuspecting hands.

The comments appear in a conversation between the Prince and primatologist Dr Jane Goodall, on the subject of what humans can learn from chimpanzees. At one point Dr Goodall says that children do not notice skin colour, to which Harry adds: “But again, just as stigma is handed down from generation to generation, your perspective on the world and on life and on people is something that is taught to you. It’s learned from your family, learned from the older generation, or from advertising, from your environment.” Well perhaps.

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And then Prince Harry goes further: “It’s the same as an unconscious bias. Something which so many people don’t understand. If you go up to someone and say ‘what you’ve just said, or the way that you’ve behaved, is racist’ – they’ll turn around and say, ‘I’m not a racist’. I’m not saying that you’re a racist. I’m just saying that your unconscious bias is proving that, because of the way that you’ve been brought up, the environment you’ve been brought up in, suggests that you have this point of view – unconscious point of view – where naturally you will look at someone in a different way.”

Of course, in some ways this is no more than a statement of the obvious. People acquire things from life as they go through it. We pick up ideas from our families, friends and the world around us (although we also shed as we pick up).

Perhaps we all have some ‘unconscious biases’: the interesting thing is which ones become acceptable to recognise (and to politically weaponise) and which do not. It may be, for instance, that Prince Harry suffers from a number of unconscious biases of his own, as may his wife, but then there are some biases that people are happy to highlight and politicise, and others thought best to skip over.

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One of the most extreme forms of – generally unconscious – bias that people demonstrate throughout their lives is towards attractive people, and not only in the selection of partners. Study after study shows that good-looking men and women stand a better chance of promotion in their chosen field of work than people who are average-looking or actively unattractive.

For instance, it may be carefully suggested that the editor of September’s issue of Vogue would not be editing September’s edition of Vogue if, rather than the acclaimed beauty she is, she looked rather more like a member of the Addams family. Or indeed an average-looking member of the general public. There may be many reasons why Prince Harry requested Meghan Markle’s hand in marriage, but her looks must have – consciously or otherwise – at least counted in her favour on the way to the altar.

Another form of bias that people express throughout their lives – again, consciously or otherwise – might be an inclination towards someone who is financially or socially secure. I should never want to accuse a Duchess – or any other member of the Royal Family – of any variety of bias. And yet it seems possible that in her search for a husband Ms Markle may have demonstrated some form of bias (unconscious or otherwise) towards thrones and their heirs. I will put the point no stronger. But in her search for love, Ms Markle must have met many people. Perhaps she met many princes and mingled with many a duke. But it is striking, at the very least, that of all the people who appeared across her path, the one she ended up marrying in a low-key ceremony at Windsor Castle happened to be the second son of the Prince of Wales.

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Did either of these (potential) expressions of unconscious bias affect anyone else? Perhaps not as badly as some expressions of bias towards people because of their race. And yet a large number of perfectly charming women never made it to the Duke’s side, at the altar or anywhere else. And a large number of slightly plain women have still not been invited to edit major fashion magazines, even fashion magazines which have become rather boringly preachy.

But this is simply an inconsistency, and we all live with inconsistencies. The problem with the Prince’s comments is more that they are part of a particular political and intellectual conveyor belt, and that belt goes only in one direction. After ‘unconscious bias’, in this pseudo-intellectual game of our time, comes the whole concept of ‘privilege’ and the earning or un-earning thereof. The privilege discussion decides – once the bias has been worked out – who has the right to speak, where, when and how often. It works out who might have benefited from ‘privilege’ and who might not. It then dictates the hierarchical order in which people may or may not speak and listen. It demotes people with privilege while aspiring to elevate those without.

People may play whatever games they think they need to play in order to achieve or retain the position they desire. I simply say – by way of warning – that though the Sussexs may think that they are playing this one with deftness and aplomb, come the next round – the discussion about unearned privilege – it is possible that Harry of Wales, and his Duchess, may find a snake where they had imagined only to find a ladder.

That is why I simply cannot understand why well-meaning, normally intelligent, people on the Left keep coming back to ‘separate but equal’ as if it were anything but a fraud. The latest proposal is from Lord Adonis, who has proposed tackling the dominance of private-school pupils at Oxbridge by setting up new separate colleges for children from poor backgrounds and state schools. He tells us, in his Guardian article headlined “Oxford and Cambridge must launch new colleges for disadvantaged young people”, that this will be just like previous access efforts for women and “persecuted religious minorities” for whom separate colleges were set up in the past.

Let’s not even try to celebrate how progressive these universities were to set up special colleges for persecuted religious minorities. Until 1854, Oxford kept out anyone who wouldn’t sign the 39 articles of the Protestant faith – and the first Catholic halls were not set up until the 1890s. Those who weren’t members of the Church of England were simply not welcome in our universities for generations, and allowing Catholics to set up a college was a simple way to prevent integration.

The case for women is more complex, because women still have their own colleges at Cambridge, though no longer at Oxford. As it happens, I studied at one – New Hall, now known as Murray Edwards. I know exactly what it’s like to be in a separate but equal institution. These separate institutions are always second class, however noble their founders’ dreams.

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For starters, there isn’t any money. Unlike the old colleges, the new ones don’t have land and investments dating back centuries to fund the costs of today. Book grants, subsidised food, cheap rent: forget about it. I was student union president and there was student demand for a rent strike over our high bills. The bursar showed me the books. There was no point. The place was permanently cash-strapped.

And no money means the academics are overstretched. They are often underpaid, too, and however dedicated they may be to the cause of women’s education, most have their eye on a more comfortable gig, down the hill, in the town centre, in a nice old building with a quiet courtyard and a little slice of history.

A good friend of mine used to invite girls back to the Trinity College library to see the manuscript copy of Winnie the Pooh held there. He tells me it was a great way to seal the deal; every girl loved it. At New Hall we didn’t have any rare books, and our most famous alumna was either Mel or Sue from Bake Off – I can’t remember which.

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Lord Adonis has a predecessor in his fool’s errand. In the 1870s, educational reformer and clergyman Joseph Paul Brereton tried to set up a college in Oxford for poor children from the county school system. When that failed, he set it up in Cambridge, to be known as Cavendish college. It was a mile out of town. The accommodation was bad. The schools didn’t want to send their pupils to this inferior Cambridge college – they wanted to send their pupils to the proper ones. Cavendish college lasted less than 20 years.

So we already know what would happen if we did as Lord Adonis recommends. He’d take the poorest group of students, with the lowest family resources, and put them into the poorest college, least able to afford book grants or hardship funds, forced to charge market rent to pay the cost of the buildings in which people are housed. These students would be far out of town, the only place cheap enough to buy land for these new colleges, so they’d have commuting costs those town-centre elites could only imagine. They’d probably have to work to make ends meet, putting them at an academic disadvantage against those with low bills, low costs, and independent funding.

The new students would have the same potential but they wouldn’t live it out.

But the most insidious effect would be to take the pressure off the old colleges to reform. Establishing women’s colleges allowed women into Cambridge without the old colleges having to open their doors. It was several more decades before the first colleges went co-educational, and decades again until the last men’s-only college reformed.

When I matriculated at New Hall in 1999, the senior tutor told us to believe – above all – that our college wasn’t second-class, and we were not second-class students. The old colleges, she said, just don’t know what clever women look like. And the sad truth is that the existence of New Hall – and Murray Edwards – means they still don’t need to learn.

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There are probably plenty of fusty old dons in Oxford and Cambridge colleges who would like Lord Adonis’ idea. It would keep the plebs out of their old traditions. It would give them a guilt-free excuse to stop worrying about access for poor children, because someone else (out of sight and out of mind) is worrying about that. In fact, they are the ones who must leave.

The funny thing is, when I first saw the headline for Lord Adonis’ article, I thought the idea was for Oxford and Cambridge to set up new sixth-form colleges, which is a brilliant idea. Hot-house kids with great potential and poor family backgrounds, either for their A-levels, or for a gap-year in between, and you have the best chance to level the playing field with those educated in our most expensive private schools.

So let’s do that instead, and leave the idea of separate-but-equal colleges where it belongs: on the scrap heap.