Oldie-readers will know the original grumpy classics master – Andrew Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version, Terence Rattigan’s wonderful 1948 play, later made into films starring Michael Redgrave (1951) and Albert Finney (1994).
The hard shell of ‘the Crock’ – aka ‘the Himmler of the Lower Remove’ – is cracked when a pupil gives him Robert Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.
The masterstroke of David Hemingson, writer, is to set the Crock’s story at Christmas and give it the feel of . Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the Crock character at Barton, a preppy New England school, in 1971.
