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Principal's Blog

Radnor House parents receive a Weekly Bulletin of news information, highlights of achievements and details of forthcoming events, as well as additional communications from other departments and individuals as necessary.

Our Principal, Darryl Wideman, also writes a regular blog to share his thoughts about education and the world with a wider audience, which you can read below.

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  • Suggested Reading – Part One

    It was always the plan to round off my blogging career at the school with some reminders of the best books I have read over the last few years and some of the ideas that have resonated most with me.  I also received a nice email a couple of weeks ago from a parent of one of our Upper Sixth leav...
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  • Think Again

    This will be the last individual book review that I will write for the weekly blog because I am planning a couple of suggested reading overviews in the next two weeks and the final blog at the end of term will, as usual, be the transcript of my prizegiving speech.  It therefore seems appropriat...
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  • And Finally on Finance

    Conscious that there will only be a few more blogs before the end of term, I will take the chance this week to wrap up some final thoughts from three books that I have reviewed recently, all of which have focused on the economy in one way or another.  As the election campaign rolls on (or shoul...
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  • Follow The Money

    You may not immediately be able to place Paul Johnson, the Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, but you would know him if you saw him, which would usually be on the news commenting on government economic policy. He is clearly an intelligent man with a very good grasp of how it all works...
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  • Other Versions Are Available

    A second visit to the thoughts of veteran US politician Bernie Sanders is needed this week to round up some more of his ideas. Not for the first time, I was reminded of the line from Enoch Powell’s biography of Joseph Chamberlain when he said: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut of...
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  • Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Money

    A few weeks ago, I highlighted Jason Hickel’s book ‘Less Is More’, which argues that our obsession with capitalist growth is doing untold damage to our planet in the pursuit of economic prosperity for the few at the expense – and potential annihilation – of the rest of...
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  • A Final Farewell to Arms?

    This year’s trip with our Year 9 pupils to the battlefields of the First World War was probably as straightforward as any of the twenty or so I have been on over the years.  The journeys back and forth passed without incident, the customs checks took no longer than might reasonably be exp...
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  • Twenty-One Years in the Charente

    Way back in 2003, in what was either the most inspired or the most foolish thing we have ever done, our family flew to France in the February half-term break and bought a house.  This was not quite the random act it may appear, because we knew when we set off on our journey that a property purc...
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  • London Calling

    The compiler of the first English dictionary, Samuel Johnson, once said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’  The London of 1777, when he made this remark, must indeed have been a place of great interest, but also no...
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  • Money Makes the World Go Round

    If, like me, you have subscribed to Private Eye magazine over several years, your view of the world almost inevitably takes on a similar slant to those who write and edit the articles.  It is called confirmation bias, and it happens to all of us.  It was the same reason my parents chose to...
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  • If It Doesn’t Hurt, It’s Probably Not Working

    We have a final visit this week to Mark Manson’s book with the asterisks on the cover, which is of course far more optimistic than the title suggests, albeit only after navigating some existential angst along the way, as you will see from what follows here.  I thought he was particularly...
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  • How Happy Are You Feeling?

    It looks like I need two more weeks to round off what I want to tell you about Mark Manson’s book – you know, the one with all the asterisks on the front cover that I’ve mentioned before and that is too rude to name here.  Like a fine wine or a mature cheese, the book gets bet...
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