Public skool monkey business

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Rupert Darwall

Labour has walked into a net-zero trap of its own making

I misjudged this book. I thought the airport fiction promised by the literary editor would take me nicely to New York, where I was going the next day. However, at 846 pages, weighing in at one kilo, Jilly Cooper’s Wicked! is long enough to get you to Australia. On my second evening in America the waitress, after reciting in a sing-song monologue the specials for the evening, added, ‘And I also must recommend that you see Wicked, the musical, while you’re here.’ ‘What’s so good about it?’ I asked. ‘Oh, the flying monkeys,’ she said. ‘They’re marvellous and they really fly.’ It turned out to be a different Wicked. There are no flying monkeys in this book, although plenty of monkey business, some of which is described below.

Jilly Cooper’s tale of two schools adds another famous public school to the list of those in which fictions have been set.