Welcome back to campus

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As a child, I loved the boarding school series by Enid Blyton: Malory Towers , with the quick-tempered, sporty Darrell Rivers as its protagonist, and St Clare’s , with the twins Pat and Isabel O’Sullivan as its main characters. It was natural to like those books back then: I was in school myself, though not a boarding school, and enjoyed their very British descriptions of tuckboxes, midnight parties, female friendships (and hostilities), and lacrosse matches — despite never having seen a tuckbox or a lacrosse match in my life. The appeal of these fictional school worlds never faded: generations later, readers are still happily boarding trains for Hogwarts.