As a former schoolmaster the England head coach, Brian Ashton, is no stranger to mixed end-of-term reports.
He's very thrawn".' With the characteristic patience of a former schoolmaster, Dalyell pauses to explain that thrawn is a Scots word for obstinate.
We went on to talk about India, Rushdie's native land, where Penguin India recently withdrew an alternative history of the Hindus by the respected US scholar Wendy Doniger, under pressure from a Hindu protest group led by a former schoolmaster.
She received a "barrage of letters and phone calls for a couple of months", and then a letter from Walter Shewring, an elderly former schoolmaster and Gill's literary executor, with whom she had struck up a warm friendship.
When, near the end of David Copperfield, the protagonist is given a tour of a new model prison by his former schoolmaster Creakle (now transmogrified into a Middlesex magistrate), he is presented with the two most exemplary prisoners, in adjacent cells.
For example, in a book of conversations with his former schoolmaster and mentor Roger Hill recorded in 1984, Orson Welles ruminates to his friend about a never-realised project, a film about his own days as the wunderkind of New York theatre in the late 30s.
A 15-part chronicle that drew upon "Richard II," the two-part "Henry IV, Henry V V," the seldom staged three-part "Henry VI and Richard IIIII," the project was conceived by Peter Dews, a 30-year-old stage director and former schoolmaster, who persuaded the BBC to embark upon its first extended Shakespeare series.
When the former schoolmaster was released without charge on 1 January he promptly contacted lawyers.
'We have got to keep our feet on the ground,' the former schoolmaster warned.
Fry re-examines his life in the light of his diagnosis, speaking to his former schoolmaster and discussing the first time he tried to kill himself, at 17.
He was still in his teens when, in 1934, he collaborated with his former schoolmaster Roger Hill — one of the important father figures in his life — on an edition of the plays titled "Everybody's Shakespeare," which was designed to shake off the dust of the classroom and get readers to put on the plays in their local gymnasiums, dance halls, or back yards.
