Within the English language ‘elite’ is one of those French loan words comfortable enough in its new habitat to have dropped its accent in many publications (though not this magazine). Adopted substantially following France’s reckoning with its own élites after 1789, it joined other Gallic descriptors of high society such as ‘le bon ton’ and still retains a residual whiff of suspicious foreign origins. Crusading journalist William Cobbett preferred the robust old English term ‘the Thing’ to describe the interlocking networks of social, economic, and political privilege that misgoverned Britain in the aftermath of revolution. Usage of ‘elite’ only soared after World War II, and especially from the 1950s, when cognate terms such as ‘the Establishment’ also became common coin. In its adjectival form in the United Kingdom, as in Australia, ‘elite’ retains some positive connotations. Generally, we are comfortable with the notion of élite athletes, as even the most cursory follower of the recent Olympic Games will have noted. As an adjective applied to other areas of life such as education and politics, or worse still as a noun, it has become a kind of slur.

So much so, argue the authors of this forensic dissection of Britain’s élite, that their subjects are almost allergic to describing themselves using the ‘e’ word. There are nice, knowing flashes of humour throughout this book. The opening vignette provides one of these. The authors recount sitting in the drawing room of a seven-bedroom Bloomsbury townhouse talking to a multi-millionaire, public-school- and Oxford-educated corporate lawyer. He bristles at their question as to whether he considers himself a member of the British élite with an irritated ‘complete rubbish’. The authors must have wished he had used ‘tosh’, ‘bosh’, or ‘twaddle’, but we can still easily conjure up the cut-glass accent in which this dismissal was delivered.