Product Description

CLASS IS DEAD! Or so everyone claims. Who better to refute this than Jilly Cooper! Describing herself as 'upper middle class', Jilly claims that snobbery is very much alive and thriving! Meet her hilarious characters! People like Harry Stow-Crat, Mr and Mrs Nouveau-Richards, Samantha and Gideon Upward, and Jen Teale and her husband Brian. Roar with laughter at her horribly unfair observations on their everyday pretensions - their sexual courtships, choice of furnishings, clothes, education, food, careers and ambitions...For they will all remind you of people that you know! 'HIGHLY ENTERTAINING, ACERBIC AND WICKEDLY OBSERVANT...CERTAIN TO BECOME AS MUCH PART OF THE VERBAL SHORTHAND AS WAS NANCY MITFORD'S U AND NON-U, A GENERATION AGO' The Economist 'ENORMOUSLY READABLE AND VERY FUNNY' Cosmopolitan

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13692 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 368 pages

From the Publisher
The devastatingly funny exposé of the English class system!

From the Back Cover
The English have been and always will be obsessed by class, even though they may not realise it. And Jilly Cooper has put an accurate, acerbic, and wickedly funny finger on the idiosyncracies of the English at home, whether it be in their castles, their nice villas in Weybridge, or in their high rise council flats. In Class we study the peculiar habits and mores of all classes - at play, at school, at work, during courtship and marriage rituals, even the way they dress, eat, and conduct their sex lives.

Here we have Harry and Caroline Stow-Crat who love their dogs more than each other, Gideon and Samanatha Upward who drink too much and are always in respectable middle-class debt, and here, too, are the wonderful Nouveau Richards, whose luxury homes are in execrable taste but blissfully comfortable with chandeliers in the loo.

About the Author
Jilly Cooper is a well known journalist, writer and media superstar. The author of many number one bestselling novels, including Riders, Rivals, Polo, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, Appassionata, Score!, Pandora and Wicked!. She and her husband live in Gloucestershire. Jilly Cooper was appointed OBE in the 2004 Queen's birthday honours list.

Customer Reviews

Breaking down the class barriers?
When I first read this book, I really didn't like it. I thought it was quite insulting really, and was surprised that I felt that way, as I usually love Jilly Cooper's work. However, when
I read it again without my working class chip on my shoulder, then I really enjoyed it, and found it very funny. The trick is to realise that it is a humourous work, and not to take it seriously. It pokes gentle fun at all the so-called classes, and no one comes out of it smelling of roses! It is a clever book, I think, and one that I have since read many times. Read it with an open mind, and you'll laugh out loud, I promise!!

Satirical yet hilarious synopsis of the British class system
This book was written in pre-Thatcher times but is still a great read. What would Jilly make of the British class system now? I suspect that despite all the surface changes, celebrity culture and apparent social mobility the class system is still much the same as it was when Jilly chronicled it in the 1970s.

Class is a must for any Jilly fan, she makes constant reference to the foibles of class throughout her brilliant Rutshire Chronicles. For example, in the book Riders, superstud aristocad Rupert Campbell-Black smothers his posh fish dish in tomato ketchup before digging into it to the horror of everyone else. He also has a penchant for white sliced pan (supposedly very working-class but also great comfort food for public schoolboys) and in the book Rivals gets a white sliced pan for Christmas from a nouveau-riche friend with working-class roots. Meanwhile the middle classes pick crusty bread daintily out of baskets.

Out of all the characters in Class I liked Snipe the labrador and Mr Definitely-Disgusting best. Buy this book, read it (you won't look up once until it's finished) and if you have any of the Rutshire Chronicles read them again. It will make them even more enjoyable!

Funny - very.
Although this book is quite dated now (1999), it is still impossible to read it without laughing out loud. The reader will also find him/herself trying to work out which category they fit into - and probably not liking the result!