Jonathan Sale

WHICH UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE PRESENTER FAILED HIS ELEMENTARY MATHS O LEVEL SIX TIMES? FOR WHICH DRAGONS' DEN INVESTOR WAS FLOGGING LEATHER JACKETS A LUNCH BREAK ACTIVITY? WHICH ENVIRONMENTALIST WAS EXPELLED AT PRIMARY SCHOOL FOR ATTEMPTING TO POISON HIS CLASSMATES WITH DEADLY NIGHTSHADE? WHICH ADVENTURER AND EXPLORER SPENT HIS TIME AT ETON SHINNING UP THE ARCHITECTURE? Through intimate conversations with journalist Jonathan Sale, some of Britain's leading personalities reminisce about their school and college days, revealing the portents, paths and false starts that led them to where they are today. With poignant and hilarious anecdotes spanning everything from those very first days at school to receiving their dreaded O level, A level and degree results, this book is brimming with recollections that every reader can associate with. Tributes are paid to the teachers who opened doors, whilst others tell tales on those who slammed them in their faces. And all credit to the teachers who were truly prophetic about their pupils. These personalities may be reticent with regard to their adult personal lives, but speak candidly about their childhoods, revealing fascinating insights into the role their formative years played in shaping them to become the people they are today.

A Miscellany of Celebrity School Days

Telling Tales Out of School

Walter Hadwen

William Tebb

Edward Perry Vollum

Addressed to a petrified Victorian society, this spine-chilling volume, long of out print and here republished in a modern edition, brings together a collection of unnerving stories of live burials and narrow escapes. An assortment of anecdotes based on historical materials and real accounts, Premature Burial was written to reassure or warn nineteenth-century readers concerned about being buried alive. This was seemingly an alarmingly frequent occurrence; one of the book’s authors himself, Dr Vollum, had narrowly escaped live sepulture after almost drowning. Gruesome stories abound: desperate men and women attempting to claw their way out of coffins; a family tradition of stabbing dead bodies in the heart to prevent live burial that results in a father stabbing his own daughter (who turned out to have been alive). There are also the more cheery tales of apparently dead bodies waking in the middle of their own funerals and accounts of last minute miracle reprieves. The authors uncovered a truly fearsome number of stories and gathered a large amount of scientific detail from a multitude of countries. Presenting detailed descriptions of a coffin that detects a breathing 'corpse’ and sounds an alarm and giving the specifics of a waiting mortuary staffed twenty-four hours a day in which 'dead’ bodies are given a chance to come round (or putrefy), Premature Burial offers potential solutions as well as terrifying anecdotes.

Jonathan Sale

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