Described by Posh Boys author Robert Verkaik as “a beautifully written painter’s portrait of surviving boarding school and finding validation in art,” this is a novelised memoir of how the experience of boarding in the 1970s helped to turn Cologne-Brookes into an oil painter and led to years of restless travel.
He wrote the book in the Louvre between 2019 and 2024 after leaving his university post. “It’s time to take stock,” he explains at the start. “I’m doing this not just by discovering Paris but also through oil painting and constructing a memoir of childhood entrapment and adult freedom.”
The two clear gains from those schooldays were his discovery of painting and his desire to be elsewhere.
Sad Little Men author Richard Beard writes that Cologne-Brookes’s “visual artist’s eye for detail evokes a distant past in all its absurdity and eccentricity” and calls the book an “uplifting account of a life in search of liberty.”
Novelist Mimi Thebo writes that “the brutality of school opens the reader’s heart (and eyes) to the brutality that lies behind so much of the art.”
Perhaps, Cologne-Brookes concludes, “contemplation of childhood bruises” can render “all the brighter the golden moments of adulthood,” and “unfortunate experience” can beget “fortunate wisdom.”
Available here.