William Golding and the Curse of the Dream

The introduction to Lord of the Flies should be reminiscent for all of us, if not of the novel itself, then because of how often we find ourselves in situations where adults go missing. They may not go missing physically as in Lord of the Flies, but adults can be psychologically and socially absent. When the adults go missing, bad things happen. The results are not confined to anarchic secondary school classrooms, but felt far and wide — including in political movements.