A Times, Spectator and Waterstones Book of the Year

‘Shocking and moving’ Guardian

‘Top marks for its searing frankness, framed in wistfully beautiful prose’ The Times

At eight years of age, Charles Spencer was sent away to one of England’s most England’s most exclusive boarding schools. Here he reveals the strange secrets of the school, and the culture of cruelty and abuse he experienced in his five years there as pupil.

Spencer reflects on the misery, hopelessness and abandonment he felt aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness and the vicious brutality of a boys’ school in the 1970s. All these years later, Spencer’s bafflement at the teachers’ motivations to inflict such cruelty on young children in palpable. As is his fury that, even if somehow he had spoken up, he’d never have been believed.

Charles Spencer’s book ‘A Very Private School’ was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 11-03-2024.

A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed, firsthand account of a culture of cruelty at the school Spencer attended in his youth and provides important insights into an antiquated boarding system. Drawing on the memories of many of his schoolboy contemporaries, as well as his own letters and diaries from the time, he reflects on the hopelessness and abandonment he felt aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness and the appalling inescapability of it all. Exploring the long-lasting impact of his experiences, Spencer presents a candid reckoning with his past and a reclamation of his childhood.