Deputy head of Ysgol Emmanuel, Rhyl, Alison Matthias is among 200 headteachers and deputies from across Britain invited to meet the prime minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie tonight.

But whereas between 1968 and 1989 he was stable jockey, Matthias is nowadays employed as top work rider and Balding's racecourse representative in his absence.

But the larger problem with The Kingdom of Matthias is that its grand theme that misogyny and reactionary nostalgia are built into the psychological structure of modernity as male responses to the emasculating experiences of domesticity and wage labor--tends to obscure the mundane fact that to his contemporaries, Matthias was a contemptible grotesque.