Peter Oborne gets into the spirit of the Olympics, reviewing Mihir Bose’s The Spirit of the Game: How Sport Made the Modern World.
By Peter Oborne, Chief Political Commentator
Almost exactly 125 years ago, a young Frenchman made a pilgrimage to Rugby School. Armed with a copy of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he headed across the quad and into the chapel, only stopping once he reached the altar beneath which Thomas Arnold, the school’s legendary headmaster, was buried.
There, as he was later to write, “in the twilight, alone in the great gothic chapel of Rugby, my eyes fixed on the funeral slab on which, without epitaph, the great name of Thomas Arnold was inscribed.
“I dreamed that I saw before me the cornerstone of the British Empire.”…read the full article
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