As one of Britain’s most indefatigable and widely read left-wing columnists, Polly Toynbee has weathered the ire of the right for over fifty years. In fact, controversy has never seemed to bother her. She has never felt the need to justify herself, and every chant of ‘champagne socialist’ has seemed only to deepen her resolve to champion causes of the disadvantaged.

An Uneasy Inheritance: My family and other radicals is inflected by her politics but is also an old-fashioned memoir in the sense of a detached survey of an entire family written for posterity’s sake. It is just one in a long tradition of memoirs from the Toynbees, an upper-middle-class progressive family with aristocratic connections. Toynbee focuses far more on her ancestors and family than herself, and never writes about herself for long without veering into her comfort zone of political commentary.

Regular readers of Toynbee’s Guardian columns will relish her shrewd, vituperative attacks on hypocritical Tories who can ‘bathe in champagne without qualms because life on their moral low ground is easy on the conscience’. Whether or not you agree, no one would doubt the sincerity of Toynbee’s socialism nor the depth of her compassion for the under-privileged.