M'lords, ladies and gentlemen

摘要

A new "Burke's Peerage" has come out after a genealogical gap of 29 years. We review it, along with the lives of two titled writers who appear in its pages. Once upon a time, "Burke's Peerage and Baronetage" (to give it its full name) was a standard reference book for just about every member of the 2,000-odd families whose kin inhabited its pages. It offered marriage guidance par excellence, it gave vital clues in pursuit of understanding how one family seemed to matter to another, and it was a comprehensive genealogical lexicon of the British upper class. For serious social historians, be they Marxist or monarchist, it has provided essential material for disentangling the intricate network of blood, money, politics and power that bound together Britain's old establishment and helped it to rule the country, certainly until the second world war and perhaps even into the late 1950s, when Harold Macmillan, a duke's son-in-law, could still pack his administration with the Eton-educated sprigs of landed and titled families, all the while jovially telling the masses (who seemed to believe him) that they had "never had it so good".