snobbery

‘I’m a hypocrite and a total fraud’ – the confessions of a French Surrealist poet

20 July 2024 9:00 am

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

20 July 2024 9:00 am

When Richard Sudell began promoting pyracantha, hanging baskets and crazy paving in the 1920s, the backlash from the gardening elite was vicious and immediate

Must Paris reinvent itself?

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

The astonishing truth about 007

30 September 2023 9:00 am

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

In praise of burning pianos

6 August 2022 9:00 am

How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…

From ‘little Cockney’ to playing Queen Mary: the remarkable career of Eileen Atkins

16 October 2021 9:00 am

Eileen Atkins belongs to a singular generation of British actresses, among them Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Sian Phillips and Vanessa…

Arthur Bryant: monstrous chronicler of Merrie England

22 May 2021 9:00 am

If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops.…

Chips Channon’s diaries can read like a drunken round of Consequences

6 March 2021 9:00 am

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

11 August 2018 9:00 am

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

28 October 2017 9:00 am

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

12 August 2017 9:00 am

We like to think we have moved on from the age of snobbery. Judging others by birth or status, or…

Class act

26 November 2016 9:00 am

I wish I could say that some of my best friends are working-class, but it’s not true. I do have…

Kathleen Kennedy arrives in London

Kathleen Kennedy kicks over the traces

4 June 2016 9:00 am

Kathleen Kennedy and her elder brother JFK were the grandchildren of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic immigrants. John F. Fitzgerald, ‘Honey…

Voting Remain is an act of heartless snobbery

14 May 2016 9:00 am

One of the interesting features of the Brexit debate is that it has laid bare a schism in British society…

The polite anti-Semitism of 20th-century Britain

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…

The hatred that Martin Amis and Jeremy Corbyn have in common

29 October 2015 9:00 am

Everyone loves an underdog. It doesn’t matter how incompetent they might be — indeed, incompetence works in their favour. You…

James Bond's secret: he's Jamaican

9 August 2014 9:00 am

Lewis Jones on Ian Fleming’s Jamaican retreat and the inspiration it provided for the Bond novels