snobbery
The pursuit of love letters: My Search for Warren Harding, by Robert Plunket, reviewed
Our magnificently monstrous anti-hero goes in quest of a cache of reputedly pornographic letters written by the former US president to his mistress
‘I’m a hypocrite and a total fraud’ – the confessions of a French Surrealist poet
My writing is mere bricolage … whatever I do, I only half do’, wails Michel Leiris in the final volume of his self-lacerating autobiography
Snobbery in the garden: U and non-U borders
When Richard Sudell began promoting pyracantha, hanging baskets and crazy paving in the 1920s, the backlash from the gardening elite was vicious and immediate
Scent and smoke and sweat
The world would never be quite the same again after we first glimpsed the casino of Royale-les-Eaux at three in the morning, says Philip Hensher
Musical misfits
How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…
The grandest dame
Eileen Atkins belongs to a singular generation of British actresses, among them Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Sian Phillips and Vanessa…
Monstrous conceit
If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops.…
More gossip and scandal
Chips Channon was conceited, snobbish, disloyal, voyeuristic and wrongheaded – all qualities most helpful to a great diarist, says Craig Brown
‘Crest’ and the absurd language of heraldry
A friend of my husband’s, yet a well-educated man, said in conversation as we walked to Tate Modern: ‘Is that…
The return of Lady Muck
My sainted mum was of untarnished working-class blood — she worked, variously, as a cleaner, factory hand and shop assistant…
Snobbery in the age of social media
We like to think we have moved on from the age of snobbery. Judging others by birth or status, or…
Class act
I wish I could say that some of my best friends are working-class, but it’s not true. I do have…
Loved and lost
Kathleen Kennedy and her elder brother JFK were the grandchildren of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic immigrants. John F. Fitzgerald, ‘Honey…
These heartless Europhile snobs
One of the interesting features of the Brexit debate is that it has laid bare a schism in British society…
Strangers in their native land
Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…
The hatred that Amis and Corbyn share
Everyone loves an underdog. It doesn’t matter how incompetent they might be — indeed, incompetence works in their favour. You…
Disciplined exoticism
Lewis Jones on Ian Fleming’s Jamaican retreat and the inspiration it provided for the Bond novels
Must Paris reinvent itself?
Muriel Zagha 27 April 2024 9:00 am
The beautifully preserved, elitist metropolis now looks increasingly out of step with neighbouring capitals and may be forced to become more multicultural