We “know” that there are two kinds of Etonian, Oppidan (those pedigreed lads who pay their own way) and Colleger (scholarship students, whose endowment carries over from King Henry’s original desire that the place be devoted to the education of the poor). That may seem like a laugh now, when the fees including “extras” come to about £30,000 a year (at current exchange rates about what it costs me to send my daughter to a day school in Washington), but the fact remains that Eton provides a number of scholarships and that, mad sports and bizarre practices to one side, it has long been celebrated for its academic rigor alone, and has had some famously fine teachers, not just Aldous Huxley, as above mentioned, but (as a visitor) Lionel Trilling. There is a legend that boys have their names “put down” for Eton at birth, but such a process is no guarantee of admission, and, for example, it seems improbable that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose son Yermolai attended the school, went through any such paternal ritual. If it had produced only sportsmen and soldiers and imperial proconsuls, like some other famous schools, it would not be so celebrated. But here is where one of the great reforming Liberal prime ministers, William Ewart Gladstone, received his grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, at which he so excelled. And here is where John Maynard Keynes, who revolutionized political and economic theory, acquired his academic sinews while, according to contemporary reports, doing some very serious sleeping around. The Etonian system is not designed to turn out a uniform product, in other words. “It also has one great virtue,” wrote the austere egalitarian George Orwell in 1948, “and that is a tolerant and civilized atmosphere which gives each boy a chance of developing a fair individuality.” Boys have their own rooms rather than sharing. Thus, though John le Carré—who taught there under his real name, David Cornwell—claims to be able to detect an Etonian in a crowded room 80 percent of the time, he told my Etonian friend Nick Fraser (author of The Importance of Being Eton) that the salient characteristic of his pupils was “cool impertinence.… The boys were adult, funny, a little removed from life even as they evolved effortlessly into the shrewdest operators. They were at once innocent and worldly.” This cultivated affect dovetails perfectly with the Niven-ish image of the deceptively polite and modest Englishman, outwardly unflappable and possessed of steely inward ruthlessness.And steely understatement is the mark of the man here. Let’s agree that things mustn’t be too strenuous either: one aims at the coolly effortless effect because anything else would run the appalling risk of seeming “boring.” This generalized diffidence extends to a number of “O.E.’s,” as alumni of Eton are called, who fail to mention the school on the dust jackets of their books.