Rank Insubordination! is a comic and dramatic novel set during a year in a boys' English public school in the mid-1950s, at the time of the cold war, the Suez Crisis and the end of empire. An austere headmaster struggles to deal with growing pupil rebellion, led by the school's Lenin. A despotic monitor, desperately competes with the rugby captain forthe amorous attention of a young French woman. A junior housemaster, renowned for his punishment floggings, gets into a tangled relationship with an assertive matron. Parents struggle with the school's hierarchical ethos. As serious unrest ferments, everybody grapples with the post-war legacy and a future with continental Europe. It's a lively story about a seminal period in the past; one with a modern resonance.