Winchester is more than a major public school with a reputation for high academic achievement and for turning out a high proportion of our bishops, judges and senior civil servants. Its reputation is based on excellence, its critics would say elitism. In fact a number of outstanding headmasters have in recent years ensured that Winchester remains one of our finest educational establishments and surprisingly at ease in the last decades of the twentieth century. Where, a quarter of a century ago, Winchester and the public school system seemed unlikely to survive into the next century, few people today question that it will not only survive but flourish.

One of those headmasters who helped transform Winchester in those crucial years is John Thorn, and his account of how that happened --- the successes and the failures --- is necessary reading for anyone interested in the future of private education and Winchester in particular.

His is no dry text book study of educational theory but a fascinating record of his own, often unorthodox, upbringing and education as well as his later teaching career, when he went from being a housemaster at Clifton College to becoming headmaster first of Repton and then of Winchester College. Early educational experiences, such as at St Paul's which he could only afford to enter on a scholarship, clearly played their part in shaping his attitudes as did later encounters with new teaching methods or with particular teachers and educators. Thus possessing a perhaps unusual breadth of perspective for a top public school headmaster, he was able to steer Winchester through a period of great radical change and experiment and also withstand the hostility of a Labour Government dedicated to public education. This, then, is not only a valuable contribution to the current educational debate but also a moving personal testament that exemplifies the principle that you cannot separate the ideas from the man.