Product Description

The first book from Britain's best-loved columnist and interviewer, Lynda Lee- Potter - a wonderful mix of autobiography and witty social analysis, as well as advice for anyone who wants to move through the class system. Does class still matter? Can you move across classes, and is it easier for men or women? What are the giveaways to your social background? Who makes up the new aristocracy? Class is still the most emotive word in Britain; using frank, funny and sometimes painful descriptions of her journey from a working-class mining background to life as part of an upper-middle-class family, Lynda Lee-Potter analyses how class pervades every aspect of our lives. She decodes everything from clothes to language to values; and laces her book with wicked anecdotes about household names, from Earl Spencer to Mick Jagger, the Countess of Wessex to Victoria Beckham.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #353936 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Lynda Lee-Potter is the renowned (and controversial) columnist for the Daily Mail, and its best-known interviewer. She was voted Columnist of the Year 2000 at the British Press Awards in March. Before she became a journalist she was an actress.

Customer Reviews

Amusing, perceptive, but fluffy
This book is overall a success. It is often funny as it attempts that most hopeless of tasks, the dissection of a living organism, the caste system in England (she rarely refers to the other parts of the realm). The book is not as profound as Paul Fussell's magisterial "Class", nor as incisive as various offerings from Tom Wolfe, but it is is amusing and perceptive. Some of the stories sound a bit like chestnuts (I knew quite a few of them and I'm not even English), but they are well chosen. She is at her best when telling her own stories, those of her marriage, family ties and working life. Although hers is not a diary, it does have some memoire-like parts, and she, as the best memoirists, seems gloriously unselfconscious. The author does no dishonour to a grand subject. Buy the book as light reading for the holidays.