Polly Toynbee’s fascinating, multi-generational memoir comes with a caveat to a Spectator reviewer. While her book is written with ‘self-conscious awareness’, Toynbee predicts, with a cautionary wag of the finger, that it will be reviewed in publications where ‘introspection is inconvenient’.

Of course, introspection drives her narrative. Toynbee, a self-confessed ‘silver-spooner’, was born into a family of towering academic and literary influencers who, while enjoying connections and lifestyles as posh as they come, almost consistently resisted and campaigned against conservative elitism and privilege. As with all families, these ‘crusty old relations’ contain two stories: the personal, emotional and psychological, and the context that predates our birth as it ‘travels up and down the social scale’. What is more, Toynbee asserts, most of us die twice: corporeal demise followed by the fog of forgottenness.

Her radical ancestors appear intact, with their wit, disapproval, passion, charisma, anger and sometimes, as with her ‘obnoxious’ snobbish grandmother Rosalind, extreme unpleasantness. Nor do money, property, cleverness and social conscience offer immunity to alcoholism, suicide, betrayal, infidelity, neglect and guilt, all of which recur throughout this epic pageant.

Toynbee’s distinguished historian grandfather Arnold Toynbee was still spoken of with awe when I was growing up. A generation further back on her mother’s side, Toynbee’s hero, the Australian-born classical scholar Gilbert Murray, instrumental in establishing the League of Nations, translated Henry IV: Part 2 into Greek, remained teetotal, had a beautiful speaking voice and was a useless parent to his five children, including the ‘old monster’ Rosalind. Another great-grandfather was an indefatigable social reformer before being incarcerated for almost 40 years after a terrifying descent into insanity.

In later years, the party was joined by the glamour of the communist Jessica Mitford and her dashing husband Esmond Romilly. Here, too, are Bertrand Russell and the sinister figure of Colin Tennant, Princess Margaret’s Mustique benefactor. Even the infant Boris Johnson appears in his pram. For Toynbee, poshery is disappointingly relentless. Discovering a potential ‘redeeming twig’ of a governess, the mother of her great-grand-father, she crosses her fingers: ‘With luck, this servant, this governess is working class.’ But she turns out to be ‘solid middle-class’, and Toynbee’s hopes are dashed.

Not a page goes by without an (often wonderfully sardonic) observation on the iniquities of class, accent, profession, money, snobbery or patriarchal dominance. It sounds like an exhausting family to belong to, as ‘little sermons about how life should be lived’ are fired off at every child with generational inevitability. The power of Toynbee’s writing lies in the small stories devoted to the chasm between affluence and poverty, advantage and obstacle.

But confusion over privilege has been hers from the youngest age. Does it mean growing up ‘surrounded by books and parents who talked to me about everything’? She envies the Bunty magazine/Quality Street environment of a neighbour and would-be childhood friend, but their burgeoning relationship is dashed with the words ‘you’re not my type,’ as Polly is condemned for her accent and for being ‘different’ to the girl who lives above the village pub.

Toynbee’s scrutiny of her own behaviour never weakens. In a glorious description of a school holiday spent working on a seductively powerful combine harvester, she pulls herself up for sentimentalising ‘the glory of hard manual work’. Memories good, bad and guilt-inducing are caught up in indulgent summers spent with her maternal grand-parents at Castle Howard, or Christmases with other family members at Glen, a freezing castle in Scotland with full-length honeycombs for breakfast, the crusts on the toast conveniently removed.

In contrast, this child of an alcoholic frequently braces herself for the inevitable disappointment when Philip, her writer father, turns up drunk once again. Meeting her grandfather at his London club, she and two great-aunts, both Oxford dons, are obliged to enter through a side door for fear women’s breath should contaminate the hallowed entrance lobby. While she has deliberately ‘skated away from the personal’, Toynbee allows herself the occasional vulnerability when mourning her mother or admitting that love for her children and grandchildren ‘clutches at the heart like nothing else’.

She is optimistic about the long-term legacy of her forebears, pointing out that after generations of liberal energy and tireless campaigning, women do have the vote, same sex marriage is recognised and black lives do matter. Demonstrating to any would-be sceptical reviewer the persuasive power of introspection in action, she faces down guilt within privilege, urging future Toynbees to recognise ‘the hypocrisy of people like us’. She has spent a lifetime highlighting the need for social change, and her book fizzes with that continuing purpose.