Although we didn't think of it in those terms at the time, I now realise that I attended a very multi-racial school. Between the ages of nine and 12, I went to a prep school in Sussex which, possibly short of numbers, recruited heavily abroad. The result was sudden influxes of differing ethnic groups. Thus the sons of members of the ruling True Whig Party in Liberia arrived in a bunch, as did several similarly highly placed Nigerians. This improved our sporting prowess. Several Persians, as everyone then called them, also came. The biggest group were the sons of a...