I don’t much like Lord of the Flies. It’s nasty, weird in an oblique, psychotic way and wrong. William Golding – a war-damaged, depressive alcoholic – wrote it as an antidote to the uplifting escapism of The Coral Island, a Victorian yarn by R.M. Ballantyne about plucky young British castaways surviving and thriving in the tropics. Golding turned it on its head and revealed, supposedly, the heart of darkness that lurks within us all.

Au contraire, Golding’s misanthropic message was bollocks

Says who? The lesson of the Christmas truce in the trenches is that ordinary men have to be coerced into killing one another. The lesson of Jena is that free-thinking individuals are averse to being slaughtered which is why, as a corrective, Bismarck invented the modern education system. The lesson of a real-life Lord of the Flies incident in 1965 in which six boys from Tonga were marooned for over a year is that, au contraire, Golding’s misanthropic message was bollocks.

Yet generation upon generation of children across the English-speaking world have this propaganda for the forces of darkness rammed down their throats at school. And I don’t think it’s accidental. When the world is run by people whose business model is perpetual war, of course it suits their agenda to persuade us all that this violence they inflict on........

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