W.G. Runciman, who died on 10 December, wrote 32 pieces for the LRB. The first, ‘On the State of the Left’, a review of The Forward March of Labour Halted? by Eric Hobsbawm, Ken Gill and Tony Benn, appeared in December 1981. The last, in January 2016, was a Diary about the regulation of the City of London. Others were on less serious (or should that be no less serious) subjects such as a review of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, published on 1 April 1983, which begins with an account of Malinowski’s anthropological method and goes on to consider its application to the inhabitants of SW3.

By now, if you're British, you've probably taken the test based on a new study of social class for the BBC by Manchester University. If you're not British, you won't know what I'm talking about – just move along. The old three-class structure is irrelevant and outdated, the survey found. It's too simplistic and no longer 'nuanced' enough. The new nuanced British class structure looks like this, with seven classes: the elite, the established middle class, the technical middle class, new affluent workers, the traditional working class and the precariat or precarious proletariat, which comprises 15 per cent of the population. We're all middle class now, except for 3/20ths of us, and they, it seems from their name, don't know whether they're coming or going.