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”.

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