This book is about success and transformation. It shows how, with patience and energy, parents and teachers can turn a child who is noisy, clumsy and forgetful into a child who is calm, careful, thoughtful and attentive - without the aid of drugs which are so often and controversially prescribed fo[...]
Muriel Spark's arch, subversive novel entertains us with its amusing, nostalgic evocation of the 1930s schooldays of a group of middle-class Edinburgh girls - then forces us to face up to the easy surface charms, and darker undercurrents, of Miss Jean Brodie's perfect self-assurance. David Robb's[...]