Book Club

BOOK OF THE WEEK with Linda Jennings. An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Education, Tony Little, ISBN  9781472913111 (Bloomsbury) SPECIAL PRICE - BD9.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

Tony Little is the headmaster of Eton. One of the most progressive and imaginative people in British education today, he has hitherto kept a low profile.

This book, published to coincide with his retirement, sets out his educational fundamentals in an exciting, sometimes controversial but always extremely readable and interesting format.

There is a crisis in the British education system. Year-on-year GCSE and A Level pupils post better exam results, with more students achieving top grades, yet business leaders and employers complain bitterly that our schools are not producing people fit for purpose.
 
Mr Little’s answer to the conundrum is to ‘scrap GCSEs so that schools can devise their own courses and give 16-year-olds a portfolio of assessed skills and demonstrable achievement in things that matter to them’.

Far from being locked in an ivory tower, a bastion of privilege, Mr Little, pictured left, has used his time as a teacher and headmaster to get to grips with fundamental questions concerning education, such as:

* How do children absorb information?
* What kind of people does society need?
* What is education for?

Not only is the author one of the great reforming headmasters of our time but he has planted academies in the East End of London, founded a state boarding school near Windsor and yet is a passionate advocate of single sex schools.

This book is not a text book for colleges of education – it is a book to enlighten the teaching profession and just as much for anxious parents and is simply arranged under topics such as authority, expectations, progress, self-confidence, sex, crises and creativity.

Mr Little thinks it is time to ask some fundamental questions, and to make brave decisions about how we make our schools and our schoolchildren fit for purpose.
I hope, now that he has retired, he will find time to write more on the subject.

My favourite read of the week
The Woman Who Stole My Life, Marian Keyes, Isbn 9780141043104 (Penguin)
BD4.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

‘Name: Stella Sweeney. Height: average. Recent life events: dramatic.’
One day, sitting in traffic, married Dublin mum Stella Sweeney attempts a good deed. The resulting car crash changes her life.

For, she meets a man who wants her telephone number (for the insurance, it turns out). That’s OK. She doesn’t really like him much anyway (his Range Rover totally banjaxed her car).

But in this meeting is born the seed of something which will take Stella thousands of miles from her old life, turning an ordinary woman into a superstar, and, along the way, wrenching her whole family apart.

Is this all because of one ill-advised act of goodwill? Was meeting Mr Range Rover destiny or karma? Should she be grateful or hopping mad?

For the first time real, honest-to-goodness happiness is just within her reach. But is Stella Sweeney, Dublin housewife, ready to grasp it?

International best-selling author, Marian Keyes’ stunning new novel The Woman Who Stole My Life is about losing the life you had and finding a better one.

Read it now in paperback
Mary Berry’s Cookery Course, Mary Berry, Isbn 9780241206881 (Dk)
BD9.900 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

I had the pleasure of meeting Mary Berry at the last London Book Fair. As generous and gracious in life as she comes through in her books, she is deservedly one of the UK’s favourite and most trusted cooks of this generation.

So let Mary take you from new cook to good cook or from good cook to great cook with Mary Berry’s Cookery Course, now in paperback. With delicious recipes from soups, starters and mains to bread, puddings and cakes, you can master the foundations of cooking and build your culinary repertoire under the guidance of Mary Berry.

Learn how to cook Mary Berry’s favourite recipes with ease and find out how Mary gets her roast chicken skin so crispy and how she ensures her apple pie doesn’t have a ‘soggy bottom’.

Perfect the basics of cooking with 12 classic ‘master recipes’ such as leek and potato soup, chargrilled salmon fillets and Victoria sandwich cake with step-by-step instructions. Then cook your way to success with over 100 fail-safe recipes with photographs of each finished dish so you know what you’re aiming for each time.

Mary also offers advice on ingredients and how to keep a well-stocked pantry as well as teaching kitchen techniques such as whipping egg whites to guarantee perfect results every time.

Mary Berry’s Cookery Course is perfect for all home cooks who want to learn to cook ‘the Mary Berry way’.