The History Boys

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 is obsessed with breaking into the ranks of those schools that regularly send boys up to Oxford and Cambridge and enlists Irwin, 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-spouting English master Hector and the regular diet of nourishing facts and figures dispensed by Mrs. Lintott, 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. Starring: Samuel Anderson, Jack Bagley, Samuel Barnett, Stephen Campbell Moore, Dominic Cooper, James Corden, Frances de la Tour, Sacha Dhawan, Richard Griffiths, Robbie Jarvis, Andrew Knott, Clive Merrison, Jon Overton, Jamie Parker, Adrian Scarborough, Georgia Taylor, Russell Tovey, Penelope Wilton. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Rated '15', released: 13 October 2006; 109 minutes. All clips, interviews and music used by kind permission of 20th Century-Fox and Cameo Productions.