History Boys, The

History. It's Just One Thing After Another.

Eight bright, funny history students in the north of England in the mid-1980s are pursuing an undergraduate place at the country's two finest universities. Their headmaster (Clive Merrison) is obsessed with breaking into the ranks of those schools that regularly send boys up to Oxford and Cambridge and enlists Irwin (Stephen Campbell-Moore), a shrewd newcomer, to coach the boys into intellectual shape for the trials ahead.

Seduced though they are by the exam busting bag of tricks offered by the temporary supply teacher, the boys are torn by their loyalty to the hugely eccentric, poetry-sprouting English master, Hector (Richard Griffiths) and the regular diet of nourishing facts and figures dispensed by Mrs Lintott (Frances de la Tour), their history mistress.

As they prepare for the daunting admissions process, the journey of the History Boys becomes as much about how education works as it is about where education leads.