Grammar school education

Why my father would have seen through Arday’s nonsense

From our UK edition

My father would have some hard words for ex-Professor Jason Arday, the serial fantasist poster cry-bully of our times, and his self-righteous claque of academic supporters. The old man’s qualifications as an Arday denier would be twofold. One, he spent his academic career studying class and society in the USSR (Privilege in the Soviet Union was the title of his most successful book). Second, as a man who made his own meteoric way from a hovel in South Wales to Oxford and then the Foreign Office, and as a member of an ethnic minority to boot, my father would have a few things to say to Arday about the realities of British social mobility and the mechanisms of oppression.

‘Sitting the 11-plus was the most momentous event of my life’ – Geoff Dyer

From our UK edition

Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.’s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don’t know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or Roland Barthes. Dyer expertly navigates the tricky territory between high culture and everyday experience, balancing erudition with comic digression in books ranging from Out of Sheer Rage (a hilarious study of not writing a book about D.H.