TAUNTON School’s new head boy, Ben Woolstencroft, is celebrating winning second prize in the prestigious Gladstone Memorial Prize for an essay on a classical topic.

The contest, run through the School Classics Journal Omnibus, is one of the most prestigious awards for school students of classics and is judged by eminent classicists from British universities.

Ben’s essay explored the portrayal of Alexander the Great in the 1956 film starring Richard Burton and the 2004 interpretation with Colin Farrell.

He looked at the how the film makers used the original sources to create their own image of Alexander and showed how the two films were very much products of the times they were made in.

It is an area which Ben hopes to study further at university as he applies to read classics in 2016.