But "the classics" are so much more than this careless and aggressive chucking around of Latin and Greek tags, as if they were bread rolls at a Bulli… - Charlotte Higgins

The wording chills me slightly, with its suggestion of a regular consignment of Eton scholars as if by a law of nature.

If the prevailing feeling is that Latin and Greek are for toffs, then Boris [Johnson], frankly, is not the man to dispel that notion.

The classics and class have always been ­uncomfortably linked. In this country's education system, knowledge of the classics was traditionally the gatekeeper of privilege. If you ­acquired the classics (even as a humble stonemason's son, like Thomas Hardy) you gained a passport to the establishment. Fail (like Hardy's character Jude) and the corridors of power remained out of reach.