The Bright White Tree

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Maurice Pappworth, the great if controversial doctor, was the most awe-inspiring person I’ve ever known.

He was vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020, [3] when he was succeeded by James Tooley. In “Advice”, one of the last poems she wrote, she sought to pass on what she had learnt from her own long experience as a patient. She was diagnosed with an incurable cancer in 2011, and lived with it bravely for five and a half years until her death at the end of 2016. Named in homage to Anna Freud, who had analysed her mother, her calm dignity and north London chic dazzled the young me from a quiet Kent town. It is with immense sadness that the Wellington Community has learned of the passing of Dr Joanna Seldon.It explored the founding of one of Britain's grandest public schools and the duke in whose name it was founded. Read more about the condition Very Good: A book that has been read and does not look new, but is in excellent condition.

Her father had been a highly controversial figure who had polarised those he met, and I suspect Joanna was anticipating a hatchet-job that would do nothing to serve her father’s memory. She achieved the top first in English to my middling second; she completed her doctorate on American literature in two years (mine, on Winston Churchill after the War, took more than four). his slides were not of the most modern but his clinical observations and insights were with me for 40+ years. She immediately endeared herself to her pupils: she was a natural and highly stimulating teacher and one who so obviously put her pupils’ interests first.

She also worked on one last book, The Whistle blower, a biography of her father that will be published next year.

The ground-breaking text took the medical establishment by storm and provoked questions in Parliament. Her novels include Still Crazy (2013), Squared (2014), Piper's Hole (2014) and Waterloo to Wellington: From Iron Duke to Enlightened College (2015).

After finishing her doctorate she took her first job as a teacher of English at the Aylesbury Grammar School. This appeared the year after Seldon died of cancer; were it not for her untimely end and her famous husband Anthony (a historian and political biographer), I’m not sure it would have been published, as the poetry is fairly mediocre, with some obvious rhymes and twee sentiments. I’ve read one of Peacock’s poetry collections, The Analyst, as well as her biography of Mary Delany, The Paper Garden.