Gilded Youth

The British public school is an iconic institution, a training ground for the ruling elite and a symbol of national identity and tradition. But beyond the elegant architecture and evergreen playing fields is a turbulent history of teenage rebellion, sexual dissidence, and political radicalism. James Brooke-Smith wades into the wilder shores of public-school life over the last three hundred years in Gilded Youth. He uncovers armed mutinies in the late eighteenth century, a Victorian craze for flagellation, dandy-aesthetes of the 1920s, quasi-scientific discourse on masturbation, Communist scares in the 1930s, and the salacious tabloid scandals of the present day. Drawing on personal experience, extensive research, and public school representations in poetry, school slang, spy films, popular novels, and rock music, Brooke-Smith offers a fresh account of upper-class adolescence in Britain and the role of elite private education in shaping youth culture. He shows how this central British institution has inspired a counterculture of artists, intellectuals, and radicals—from Percy Shelley and George Orwell to Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson—who have rebelled against both the schools themselves and the wider society for which they stand. Written with verve and humor in the tradition of Owen Jones’s The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, this highly original cultural history is an eye-opening leap over the hallowed iron gates of privilege—and perturbation.

The Gilded Youth of Thermidor is a historical account of the Thermidorian Reaction following the fall of Robespierre in July of 1794. François Gendron has made an exhaustive examination of the 36,000 files of the Revolutionary police to reconstruct events on the streets as they parallelled those in the Assembly and provides a picture of social and political life in Paris at the time. He describes how the sans-culottes, the lower-class radicals who had been the mainspring and vanguard of the French Revolution, were crushed, and analyses the role played by the jeunesse dorée in their defeat.

A colorful, fascinating look at growing up in the royal family over the centuries, from the Plantagenets and Tudors to the Windsors and Cambridges. For as long as the British royal family has existed, their children have been brought up in ways that seem bizarre and eccentric to the rest of us—the royal family’s obsession with making their children tough and independent as early as possible, often by delegating their parental duties to staff, goes back centuries. Gilded Youth looks at centuries of growing up aristocratic and royal—from Edward VII smashing up his schoolroom to Prince Andrew peeing on a stable lad’s shoes; from Princess Margaret putting horse manure in a footman’s pockets to Diana Spencer wearing crop tops, kissing a local village boy, and drinking cider in a bus shelter; from a teenage Prince Harry throwing up in the street to Prince William becoming completely obsessed with doing the right thing regardless of the feelings of his younger brother. Even Queen Elizabeth herself reacted oddly to her upbringing, becoming in many ways obsessively compulsive—as a child she insisted her shoes should always be positioned in the same place, her lunch set out exactly the same way each day, and that for tea she have jam pennies (small rounds of bread and jam), which she was still eating every afternoon into her nineties. The younger generation seem to insist they want a normal or ordinary upbringing for their children—because that goes down well with the public—but this is just window dressing. Gilded Youth looks at how, when it comes to their children, the British royal family is still behaving much as they did in the past.

A colorful, fascinating look at growing up in the royal family over the centuries, from the Plantagenets and Tudors to the Windsors and Cambridges. For as long as the British royal family has existed, their children have been brought up in ways that seem bizarre and eccentric to the rest of us—the royal family’s obsession with making their children tough and independent as early as possible, often by delegating their parental duties to staff, goes back centuries. Gilded Youth looks at centuries of growing up aristocratic and royal—from Edward VII smashing up his schoolroom to Prince Andrew peeing on a stable lad’s shoes; from Princess Margaret putting horse manure in a footman’s pockets to Diana Spencer wearing crop tops, kissing a local village boy, and drinking cider in a bus shelter; from a teenage Prince Harry throwing up in the street to Prince William becoming completely obsessed with doing the right thing regardless of the feelings of his younger brother. Even Queen Elizabeth herself reacted oddly to her upbringing, becoming in many ways obsessively compulsive—as a child she insisted her shoes should always be positioned in the same place, her lunch set out exactly the same way each day, and that for tea she have jam pennies (small rounds of bread and jam), which she was still eating every afternoon into her nineties. The younger generation seem to insist they want a normal or ordinary upbringing for their children—because that goes down well with the public—but this is just window dressing. Gilded Youth looks at how, when it comes to their children, the British royal family is still behaving much as they did in the past.

They were the children of France's most celebrated men of nineteenth-century letters and science, the celebrity heirs and heiresses of their day. Their lives were the subject of scandal, gossip, and fascination. Léon Daudet was the son of the popular writer Alphonse Daudet. Jean-Baptiste Charcot was the son of the famed neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, mentor to a young Sigmund Freud. And Jeanne Hugo was the adored granddaughter of the immortal Victor Hugo. As France readied herself for the dawn of a new century, these childhood friends seemed poised for greatness. In Gilded Youth, Kate Cambor paints a portrait of a generation lost in upheaval. While France weathered social unrest, violent crime, the birth of modern psychology, and the dawn of World War I, these three young adults experienced the disorientation of a generation forced to discover that the faith in science and progress that had sustained their fathers had failed them. With masterful storytelling, Cambor captures the hopes and disillusionments of those who were destined to see the golden world of their childhood disappear - and the universal challenges that emerge as the dreams of youth collide with the realities of experience.