The New Book of Snobs - Hardcover

Taylor, D.J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1472123948 ISBN 13: 9781472123947

Publisher: Constable & Robinson, 2017

Synopsis

'Hugely enjoyable' AN Wilson, Sunday Times

'Thoughtful, entertaining and enjoyable' Michael Gove, Book of the Week, The Times

Inspired by William Makepeace Thackeray, the first great analyst of snobbery, and his trail-blazing The Book of Snobs (1848), D. J. Taylor brings us a field guide to the modern snob.

Short of calling someone a racist or a paedophile, one of the worst charges you can lay at anybody's door in the early twenty-first century is to suggest that they happen to be a snob. But what constitutes snobbishness? Who are the snobs and where are they to be found? Are you a snob? Am I? What are the distinguishing marks? Snobbery is, in fact, one of the keys to contemporary British life, as vital to the backstreet family on benefits as the proprietor of the grandest stately home, and an essential element of their view of who of they are and what the world might be thought to owe them.

The New Book of Snobs will take a marked interest in language, the vocabulary of snobbery - as exemplified in the 'U' and 'Non U' controversy of the 1950s - being a particular field in which the phenomenon consistently makes its presence felt, and alternate social analysis with sketches of groups and individuals on the Thackerayan principle. Prepare to meet the Political Snob, the City Snob, the Technology Snob, the Property Snob, the Rural Snob, the Literary Snob, the Working-class Snob, the Sporting Snob, the Popular Cultural Snob and the Food Snob.

About this title

About the Author

D.J. Taylor's novels include English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006), a Publishers Weekly book of the year, and The Windsor Faction (2013), joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including Orwell: The Life, winner of the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography and, most recently, The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (2016). He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore, and their three sons.

Review

An intelligent writer―Guardian

Thoughtful, entertaining and enjoyable . . . Taylor has a shrewd eye for the ways in which snobbery evolves over time―The Times

Hugely enjoyable―Sunday Times

With nearly all status signifiers in flux, books like Taylor's are more important than ever. Snobbery and immense learning, he makes plain, do not always walk hand in hand.
―Dwight Garner, New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Constable & Robinson
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1472123948
• ISBN 13: 9781472123947
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288