With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

History Boys (Movie)

SOURCE: Guardian

There can't be many people under 40 for whom the lost convention of the"seventh-term" Oxbridge exam means anything, and even among the over-40s, it isn't exactly a cultural touchstone, like the 11-plus. But until 20 years ago, this was how post-A-level teenagers at top schools prepared for the now abolished entrance examinations for Oxford and Cambridge Universities: they came back after the summer for one more term of cramming - sometimes in a daringly relaxed, proto-collegiate style - before sitting the papers just before Christmas. It is this arena of callow and precocious learning in which Alan Bennett set his smash-hit 2004 play about a bunch of bright young lads at a Sheffield grammar school, going all out for Oxbridge glory. This has now been turned into a stagey and oddly contrived movie directed by Nick Hytner, with the kind of elaborate, highly worked dialogue that is exhilarating in the theatre, but rather unreal-sounding on the big screen.