At school Richard Branson would sit at the back of the class “doing my own thing”, baffled by the lessons. “I was a dyslexic school kid who had very little understanding about what we were being taught and what was going on on the blackboard,” he says. “Bizarrely for a dyslexic, I started planning a magazine to try to get young people to campaign for a change in the education system to make it more relevant to people, and also to campaign against the Vietnamese War and the Biafran War and other injustices that were going on in the world at the time.”

One day the headmaster at Stowe, his independent boarding school, gave him an ultimatum. “He said to me, ‘Richard, I know you’re