Book of the week: Doom

The Scottish-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has put the pandemic in the historical context of catastrophes

“The literary micro-genre of Eton memoirs by black former pupils has doubled in size,” said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT. Fifty years ago, Dillibe Onyeama’s N****r at Eton caused the Nigerian writer to be banned from ever returning to the school. Now comes Musa Okwonga’s One of Them, which describes his time at Eton in the 1990s.

The son of Ugandan immigrants, Okwonga grew up in a working-class suburb in west London and became obsessed with Eton aged 11, after watching a documentary about it. Two years later he won a half-scholarship, and found himself “among a small minority of black pupils”, rubbing shoulders with the likes of princes William and Harry. His “nuanced” account of the school, while not entirely uncritical, is unlikely to lead to a ban: the place, he reports, made him feel safe, and he flourished academically under “nurturing teachers”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us