london burning book review

London, Burning by Anthony Quinn review – portrait of a divided country

Four strangers are united by the tensions of late 70s Britain in the latest of Quinn’s gratifying London novels

S et during the dog days of the Callaghan Labour government, Anthony Quinn’s latest period novel extends his richly pleasurable and loosely connected series portraying London down the decades. Since 2011, he has fused romance, mystery and social realism to produce a kind of epic Londoniad, tackling the city’s Victorian slums ( The Streets ), the first world war ( Half of the Human Race ), the 30s ( Curtain Call ), the blitz ( Our Friends in Berlin ), the 50s and 60s ( Freya and Eureka ), and now the late 70s, a time of strikes, IRA violence and the imminent election of Margaret Thatcher. It’s David Peace territory, but Quinn is a steadier, suaver writer, relying on the old-school charms of rounded characters and a clockwork plot. Involving police corruption and showbiz hanky-panky, London, Burning brings together four strangers: Hannah, a go-getting reporter; Vicky, a newly promoted detective; Callum, an English lecturer from County Down; and Freddie, a married theatre director sleeping with a television star angling for the lead role in his new show. At the centre of it all is Thatcher’s shadow home secretary, Anthony Middleton, an ex-spy and former POW vowing to crush the unions and the IRA alike. A fictional version of Airey Neave, he also dies in a car bomb, but Quinn’s aim isn’t to recreate the assassination so much as use it as a catalyst for events that pull together his central quartet. A kneejerk arrest fuelled by anti-Irish bigotry is only the start, as the killing inspires a network of crooked cops running a drugs racket.

Quinn’s flair for flesh-and-blood characters means any one of his main four could carry the novel alone, but Freddie is the standout: a greedy, needy love rat, pompously oblivious to the distress he causes his staff, he nonetheless heroically makes amends after contriving to steer his black driver into a National Front march. By the time we’re told that Freddie considers himself a prime IRA target (“murdering him would gain them huge publicity”), our sense of his vanity comes tinged with affection, thanks to Quinn’s genial even-handedness. As a plotter, Quinn loves coincidence and seems keener than usual that we should know it: Callum tells a student that “it’s a useful device for linking a long, multi-character story... Overuse it and you test the reader’s credulity. On the other hand, existence is random, as we know; the chance meeting does happen.” As if to prove the point, on the next page he’s brought in for questioning; lucky he once saved Vicky’s brother from getting beaten up after a Clash gig, and that he studied in Dublin with Callaghan’s press secretary (handy, but not in a way we guess). From Warninks liqueur to workplace sexism, the novel is awash with period markers both solemn and light-hearted; at one point Hannah’s boyfriend uses his Access card to chop out a line of cocaine. But as well as taking a trip down memory lane, Quinn wants to explore how Labour voters were blindsided by Thatcher’s rise; he seems here to have the complacency of 21st-century echo chambers in mind as much as the dogma of the past. Hannah doesn’t peg her man for a Tory voter: “He was considerate and funny and well dressed, he didn’t patronise women as far as she could tell – and he loved Joni Mitchell.” London, Burning has enough material for a novel twice as long, and you sense Quinn’s consummate courtesy as a writer might extend to needless worry about outstaying his welcome. But the loose ends hint that he may be writing a sequel even as we speak: roll on the 80s.

London, Burning by Anthony Quinn is published by Little, Brown (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

This article was amended on 19 April. A previous version had wrongly suggested that Airey Neave was killed by the IRA

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Dark days for Britain: London, Burning, by Anthony Quinn, reviewed

The national front reaches its peak of popularity as ira bombs terrorise the capital in this disturbing novel set in the late 1970s.

• From magazine issue: 17 April 2021

Mark Bostridge

London, Burning

Anthony Quinn

Little, Brown, pp. 339, £14

Not long ago, a group of psychologists analysing data about national happiness discovered that the British were at their unhappiest in 1978. Reading Anthony Quinn’s enjoyable novel set in that year and early 1979, it’s not difficult to see why. In case you’ve forgotten, strikes were spreading like wildfire. The National Front were reaching a peak of popularity. Most alarming of all, the Provisional IRA were expanding their bomb attacks on mainland Britain.

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There were compensations. Kate Bush’s whiny lament ‘Wuthering Heights’ was released in 1978, and there was a new Pinter at the National Theatre ( Betrayal ). Punk rock was going commercial. One of the characters in London, Burning turns up at a party in a white trouser suit with kick-flares, a sort of homage to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever . Quinn trowels on the period detail in a way that initially feels oppressive and faintly ridiculous, but which becomes increasingly funny with each new placement.

Into this maelstrom are thrown four protagonists: Vicky, a young policewoman; Hannah, a streetwise reporter on a national (too much like a stock character); Calum, a struggling Irish academic; and Freddie, a theatrical impresario (the best realised of the lot). Their destinies are interlinked in a narrative dependent on a series of coincidences, excused here as illustrating the randomness of life. The capital itself doesn’t figure much as a character, merely as a backdrop. Nor is there a great sense of 1970s society being on the brink of change. There’s something curiously static about this, as if the novel’s larger underlying themes had failed to rise to the surface.

Quinn lights a long fuse and stands well back. The story’s two bomb explosions, the first killing the shadow home secretary — a fairly colourless rendition of Airey Neave, mysteriously disguised as ‘Middleton’, which was Neave’s second name — are every bit as exciting and climactic as they should be. The loud thunderclap of one bomb going off made me shudder at the memory of an IRA explosion which I witnessed at close quarters and which came close to killing me. Extraordinary to think of the extent to which, as a pupil at a central London school in 1978, one’s existence was constantly shadowed by the threat of bomb scares and actual explosions.

Off stage, at the end of the novel, is the country’s triumphant first woman prime minister. ‘The barbarians are at the gates,’ declares one character. ‘Who knows,’ says another, ‘the change might do us good.’

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London, Burning

Anthony Quinn Little, Brown Released 8 April 2021

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In his earlier novel, Curtain Call , Anthony Quinn demonstrated great interest in and impressive knowledge of the London Theatre scene just before the Second World War. While London, Burning ranges more widely, one significant thread follows the activities of a theatre director enjoying his pomp in the 1970s, when this novel is set.

Quinn’s style is to start a number of hares running, slowly but inexorably bringing them together in plots that are always satisfying and often thrilling. In this case, we follow the trail of Vicky, a young police officer who finds herself embroiled in a series of juicy cases but also an uncomfortable web of corruption.

Then there is Callum, a bookish lecturer from Newry in Northern Ireland with an accent that instantly inflames prejudice at a time when the IRA was launching a war on the United Kingdom with explosive activity in London.

The linchpin who eventually connects each of the themes is a Fleet Street broadsheet journalist named Hannah. She is good at her job but also attractive enough to ensure that every man in the novel makes a play for the desirable hack. That includes theatre director Freddie, the talented grandee in charge of the fictional National Music Hall.

The name may include something of an in-joke, since anyone with a reasonable knowledge of theatre history of the period will instantly recognise a portrait that feels incredibly close to the future Sir Peter Hall. As readers will discover, Freddie is not only a self-promoting workaholic but also a superb theatre director and compulsive adulterer.

He is not the only real-life character mildly fictionalised to ramp up the drama. The shadow Home Secretary who hopes to take over as Northern Ireland minister in a future government led by Margaret Thatcher, if only she can win the election, has much in common with the late Airey Neave, once an escapee hero of Colditz and subsequently a strong-willed, unforgiving Tory politician.

Having introduced these memorable characters and many more, Anthony Quinn weaves a plot that features Freddie trying to balance a precarious love life and stressful career as his 50 th birthday approaches, Hannah and Vicky pairing up to do detective work after a pair of IRA bomb outrages and some political inside knowledge as strikes and then the 1979 general election threaten to wreck Freddie’s birthday party, not to mention the career of James Callaghan.

As always, this author has written an addictive page turner, while at the same time showing off his literary credentials and a great knowledge of the stage, not to mention the colourful history of one of its most highly regarded and larger-than-life characters.

Reviewer: Philip Fisher

* Some links, including Amazon, Stageplays.com, Bookshop.org, ATG Tickets, LOVEtheatre, BTG Tickets, Ticketmaster, LW Theatres and QuayTickets, are affiliate links for which BTG may earn a small fee at no extra cost to the purchaser.

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London, Burning: ‘A page-turning delight’

For his eighth novel, Anthony Quinn continues his noble tradition of producing a thumping good read

T he publicity blurb for the film critic-turned-novelist Anthony Quinn’s new book — his eighth novel — describes him as “one of Britain’s finest contemporary writers”. This may come as a surprise to many, not because of any dearth of talent on Quinn’s part but because he has somewhat flown under the radar during his career. This is despite winning numerous awards, including the Authors’ Club award for Best First Novel for his 2009 first novel The Rescue Man, and his biggest success to date, 2015’s Curtain Call, has been adapted for film by none other than Patrick Marber, featuring a starry cast including Gemma Arterton, Colin Firth, and in the role of Jimmy Erskine, a lightly fictionalised version of the theatre critic James Agate, Simon Russell Beale.

Quinn’s novels all follow a relatively similar trajectory. They are all set in a specific historic period, ranging from the Victoria era ( The Streets) to London, Burning ’s keenly evoked depiction of the late Seventies, when Britain was a country of uncollected rubbish and the tail end of the Callaghan government, with the IRA striking fear into the nation. Many of them feature real-life characters barely disguised for creative purposes, such as the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan appearing as Nat Fane in Freya and Eureka or, here, the director Peter Hall being lightly guyed as the priapic gourmand Freddie Selves, in charge of the National Music Hall as he juggles responsibilities professional and personal.

And all of them, without exception, are that rarest and most unfashionable of things, a thumping good read. His new book carries on that noble tradition.

London, Burning is Quinn’s first novel for Little, Brown — the others were published by Jonathan Cape — but a change of publisher has done nothing to change his modus operandi. It focuses on four major characters including the aforementioned Selves; Vicky Tress, a policewoman who finds herself mired within a corruption scandal in the Met; Hannah Strode, a reporter on a paper not a million miles away from The Independent; and Callum Conlan, a Northern Irish academic who is regarded with faint suspicion because of his accent and background. Over the course of the novel, the characters interact with one another in both predictable and unexpected ways, as terrorist bombings, thwarted and otherwise, punctuate the narrative to explosive effect.

Quinn is a witty and erudite writer who manages to make his characters’ dialogue sound natural and engaging

If Quinn should be compared to any other novelist, William Boyd is a fair point of comparison. Like Boyd, Quinn is a witty and erudite writer who manages to make his characters’ dialogue sound natural and engaging, and whose literary name-dropping (the first paragraph of the second chapter contains two separate — and entirely appropriate — allusions to Philip Larkin) exemplifies the slight artificiality of the worlds that he creates. Quinn’s years spent as a film critic can be discerned from the cinematic sweep of his narratives and the speed with which he establishes his mise-en-scène; if you’re not gripped within the first ten or so pages, then you haven’t been paying attention.

This isn’t to say that London, Burning is a flawless novel. The storyline involving PC Tress is full of vivid and interesting details (I never knew that “plonk” was slang for a WPC) but it suffers from a sense of over-familiarity. I cannot be the only reader who is weary of tales of institutional corruption in the Met, even down to the character of a loquacious grass who helpfully dispenses plot-advancing titbits at the appropriate moment. It is also resolved in a frustratingly open-ended fashion, hinting at a follow-up novel if this one is a success. Some of Tress’s actions and motivations later in the book seem to stretch credibility, although it would be unfair to hint at why. And at least one major development in the book seemed slightly pat and convenient, hinging on a dramatic device — the writing of a letter by a high-ranking politician — that would have been seen as old hat as far back as the Victorian novelists that Quinn clearly reveres.

The title might seem to suggest a fierier conflagration than eventually takes place, but Quinn’s book is a page-turning delight

Yet such objections are ultimately niggling and somewhat mean-spirited when set against the novel’s greater achievements. Just as Erskine ends up dominating Curtain Call entirely — it’s nominally a murder mystery but it becomes a wonderful character study — so Selves is undoubtedly the most flamboyantly enjoyable figure depicted here. Anyone who has read Peter Hall’s Diaries, which depict his time running the National Theatre while dealing with union strikes, grumpy journalists and unreliable thespians, will relish his alter ego’s portrayal. Quinn sensibly borrows some of the most engaging stories about the real-life Hall, such as his ill-considered but lucrative decision to appear in an advert for Sanderson wallpaper, and places them in a highly entertaining dramatic context. Yet crucially, Selves remains a likeable and engaging character, despite his frequently dreadful behaviour, meaning that the reader sympathises with, rather than despairs at, his antics.

There are numerously beautifully drawn set-pieces throughout, ranging from an unintentional blind date to a High Tory New Year’s Eve party in the country, featuring an irritating party animal known as “Banger”. If Quinn flirts with tastelessness by depicting the late Airey Neave as a character called Anthony Middleton, a hardline hanger and flogger who sees the conflict with the Irish as an almost religious exercise in crusade, then this pays off splendidly in a well-observed and tense scene at a first-night party at the National Music Hall, showing the pervasive fear that Londoners felt at all times with the prospect of bombings and terrorism.

The title might seem to suggest a fierier conflagration than eventually takes place, but Quinn’s book is a page-turning delight. I can pay it no higher compliment than to say that, when I finished reading it, I felt almost sad that I was not going to be spending time with its characters any longer, and I hope that a sequel or continuation of this fascinating saga awaits in due course.

London, Burning is due to be published by Little, Brown on 8 April 2021

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London, Burning

By anthony quinn.

8th April 2021

Price: £14.99

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London Burning

A fresh account of how Londoners responded to the impact of the Second World War. 

In this, his eighth book on London’s history, Jerry White gives us a fresh and masterful account of how Londoners responded to the impact of the Second World War. This is well-trodden territory, but White offers a distinctive perspective on the appalling toll from the air raids and how officials and volunteers came together to save lives and their city. 

It became fashionable in the 1990s to write of ‘the myth of the Blitz’ and White usefully contextualises this trend. He points out that observers in 1940 needed ‘a story’ and critical assessments based on local failings had a lasting effect. Even Mass Observation could be ‘constitutionally disposed to look on the gloomy side of life’. The reality was more complex. 

There are expert insights into the politics of local civil defence. Labour fiefdoms could be resentful of the arrival of well-intentioned volunteers. Poplar was ‘a model of civil defence’, in contrast to Stepney, where there were failings of leadership. The better-run boroughs had the good sense to bring their post-raid facilities into one building to save the bombed-out from having to traipse from one office to another. As for central government, it was known to be penny-pinching and was often under suspicion. 

There is interesting material on London’s economy, including the adaptability of companies to the demands of the war. Ford Dagenham, for example, produced nearly 350,000 army lorries, RAF tractors and troop carriers. We get a sense of the physical changes to the city – the huge pile of rubble trucked over from the devastated areas and heaped up in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Everyone was conscious of class differences, but there was greater equality now: air raid warden Barbara Nixon observed how a number 38 bus conductor neatly reproved a well-to-do woman who complained about the presence of a wretched-looking passenger with her two children. With dust and glass in their hair, the conductor could see that they had just survived a raid.

Throughout the book White deploys the words of a handful of diarists: typists, a clerk, a warehouseman, a social worker. ‘Hope to goodness my nerve doesn’t break’, confided Olivia Cockett. ‘How I hate myself for being sick with fear’, worried Vivienne Hall. With them we sense the relentless arrival each year of Christmas, somehow needing to be celebrated despite shortages and there being no end in sight. 

The rest of the nation knew that London had had it the worst. White gives us little-known episodes, like the selfless support that came from the provinces at the time of the V1 flying bomb attacks: 1,000 air raid wardens from across Britain travelled to the capital to help defend it against this new and terrifying phenomenon. The WVS (Women’s Voluntary Services) ingeniously organised the ‘adoption’ of London boroughs by regions in the rest of the UK. Warwickshire adopted Shoreditch, Shropshire adopted Hackney and so forth, supplying them with all manner of furniture and appliances. 

Eventually the war ended, but the scale of the destruction meant that there was desperate overcrowding and homelessness, with thousands in temporary billets and shelters. Nearly 30,000 Londoners had lost their lives and over 50,000 had been hospitalised by injury. The collectivism that had been ‘woven into the fabric of every neighbourhood’ had produced extraordinary bonds but, as White shows us in this masterful account, the city’s recovery would take decades.

The Battle of London 1939-45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire Jerry White The Bodley Head 448pp £30 Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Suzanne Bardgett is Head of Research and Academic Partnerships, Imperial War Museum Institute.

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London, Burning: 'Richly pleasurable' Observer Hardcover – 8 April 2021

London, Burning is a novel about the end of the 1970s, and the end of an era. It concerns a nation divided against itself, a government trembling on the verge of collapse, a city fearful of what is to come, and a people bitterly suspicious of one another. In other words, it is also a novel about now. Vicky Tress is a young policewoman on the rise who becomes involved in a corruption imbroglio with CID. Hannah Strode is an ambitious young reporter with a speciality for skewering the rich and powerful. Callum Conlan is a struggling Irish academic and writer who falls in with the wrong people. While Freddie Selves is a hugely successful theatre impresario stuck deep in a personal and political mire of his own making. These four characters, strangers at the start, happen to meet and affect the course of each other's lives profoundly. The story plots an unpredictable path through a city choked by strikes and cowed by bomb warnings. It reverberates to the sound of alarm and protest, of police sirens, punk rock, street demos, of breaking glass and breaking hearts in dusty pubs. As the clock ticks down towards a general election old alliances totter and the new broom of capitalist enterprise threatens to sweep all before it. It is funny and dark, violent but also moving.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Little, Brown
• Publication date 8 April 2021
• Dimensions 15.8 x 3.2 x 23.6 cm
• ISBN-10 1408713209
• ISBN-13 978-1408713204
• See all details

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Book description, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown (8 April 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1408713209
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1408713204
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.8 x 3.2 x 23.6 cm
• 1,431 in Political Fiction (Books)
• 19,346 in Historical Fiction (Books)
• 22,570 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Anthony quinn.

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Customers find the book engrossing, well-written, and thought-provoking. They also appreciate the rich, engaging, and believable characters. Readers describe the evocation of late 1970s London as vivid and authentic.

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Customers find the book engrossing, well-written, and thought-provoking. They also appreciate the rich, engaging, and believable characters. Readers also mention the book is a superb, hugely enjoyable, and compelling reenactment.

"This is a memorable, glorious novel evoking with pinpoint accuracy , the angst and depression of the late 70s...." Read more

"...Quinn's style makes this an easy read for the most part, although he does enjoy throwing the odd highbrow word in to make a simple working class boy..." Read more

"... Deftly plotted , London, Burning offers a vivid evocation of late seventies London that has intriguing parallels with the world we live in now, but..." Read more

"...really enjoyed them, well written, great authentic period detail and good plots . London, Burning also had this - great picture of late 70s London...." Read more

Customers find the characters believable.

"... Characters encompass honest cops , bluff theatre worthies and punk rockers. Even the title - from the first Clash album - is a masterstroke...." Read more

"Anthony Quinn builds rich, engaging, believable characters who stay with you long after the final page has been turned...." Read more

"...The characters are well drawn and thought out and there is a relentless energy about the plot which manages to explore and navigate a disparate..." Read more

"...But it also delivers a full cast of memorable characters , described with warmth and a persistently sharp wit. Lovely writing." Read more

Customers find the book vivid and well-written. They appreciate the authentic period details and good plots.

"...Deftly plotted, London, Burning offers a vivid evocation of late seventies London that has intriguing parallels with the world we live in now, but..." Read more

"...Anthony Quinn books and really enjoyed them, well written, great authentic period detail and good plots...." Read more

" Richly evocative of late 70s London . Four main characters interweave their lives, very well drawn, a good read." Read more

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From the publisher

London, Burning is a novel about the end of the 1970s, and the end of an era. It concerns a nation divided against itself, a government trembling on the verge of collapse, a city fearful of what is to come, and a people bitterly suspicious of one another. In other words, it is also a novel about now. Vicky Tress is a young policewoman on the rise who becomes involved in a corruption imbroglio with CID. Hannah Strode is an ambitious young reporter with a speciality for skewering the rich and powerful. Callum Conlan is a struggling Irish academic and writer who falls in with the wrong people. While Freddie Selves is a hugely successful theatre impresario stuck deep in a personal and political mire of his own making. These four characters, strangers at the start, happen to meet and affect the course of each other's lives profoundly. As the clock ticks down towards a general election old alliances totter and the new broom of capitalist enterprise threatens to sweep all before it. It is funny and dark, violent but also moving.

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London Burning: Portraits from a Creative City Hardcover – November 23, 2015

An exploration of the personalities, diversity, and pulsing energy that make London an international hub for creativity and innovation

• Print length 600 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Thames & Hudson
• Publication date November 23, 2015
• Dimensions 11.25 x 2.5 x 13.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0500970718
• ISBN-13 978-0500970713
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thames & Hudson; First Edition (November 23, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 600 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0500970718
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0500970713
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.28 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 11.25 x 2.5 x 13.25 inches
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The Burning Earth — how we exploited the environment and put our own future in jeopardy

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Good lives on our one planet

Book review: The Burning Earth, by Sunil Amrith

“I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place,” says Sunil Amrith. His book The Burning Earth traces those threads over the last 500 years, showing the interweaving of progress and disaster.

It’s hard to argue with ‘human freedom’ as a worthy goal, but one of the most successful routes to that has been the way that fossil fuels have provided an escape from nature. “In the pursuit of freedom there crept, over time, a notion previously unthinkable: that true human autonomy entailed a liberation from the binding constraints of nature.”

The book begins with the Mongol empire and its dillemma: continue ruling as a nomadic force, or learn to govern settled lands? We spend time in the Mughal Empire, and follow the treasure ships of the Qing dynasty. I was particularly pleased to find a history of the spread of rice. I’ve read many accounts of the agrarian revolution and the neolithic shift to farming. None of them spent any time discussing rice, despite the fact that “rice sustained more human lives than any other crop until the advent of industrial agriculture.”

Following chapters look at the expansion of the Russian empire, battles to control land and taxation in China and India, and then the slave trade and colonialism. Plantation culture brought a new disposability to farming that hadn’t been there before. Plantation owners didn’t have any allegiance to the land. They came from the other side of the world, expecting to exhaust it and move on with the profits. Consumption without responsibility, a foreshadowing of what was to come.

There have been similar books attempting histories of this kind, but the global scope of the examples really sets The Burning Earth apart. It’s an engaging read, full of anecdotes and asides, eyewitness testimonies, unexpected connections. It’s very diverse, skipping between economic, social and environmental history across the continents.

Popular histories written in the UK perhaps inevitably have a Western perspective that casts Britain as the protagonist of history. Sunil Amrith is from Singapore, and so we hear as much from the East as we do from the West. We get a different view on well known historical events.

Plenty has been written about how railways reshaped the world, for example. Amrith covers this, but tells it from the point of view of the Chinese migrant workers who laid the rails across America. 90% of the Grand Pacific Railroad’s labourers were Chinese. The chapter on the Second World War describes the war-related famines experienced by civilian populations in Indonesia, Vietnam, China and India. In total seven million people died in these famines. Each country had a far higher death toll than Britain, but with the exception of the Bengal famine, I’ve not heard about them in any account of the war I’ve read.

By decentralising the usual Western story, Amrith illuminates a world of difference. As the book progresses we see how so much human progress depended on fossil fuels, ironing out the unpredictabilities and vulnerabilities of dependence on nature. We see the huge benefits of urbanism, industrial chemistry, growing political freedoms, global trade. In many places that story is still unfolding, and for those of us in consumer economies it is easy to point the finger at the carbon emissions of others and forget the weight of human suffering that is lifted by material progress.

Towards the end of the book we get to the fires, the floods, the emergence of new diseases, and of course the fight to restrain carbon emissions and rising temperatures. By setting this damage in the context of expanding progress, Amrith tells a nuanced story that invites us to look more closely at global inequalities. Yes, human progress has been inseparable from environmental harm, but we can look at this another way. Our solutions to that environmental harm are also part of a wider story, and “the pursuit of environmental justice extends and builds on those earlier and still unfinished struggles for human freedom.”

I really enjoyed The Burning Earth . I learned a lot. I appreciated the depth of its scholarship and the entertaining presentation thereof, and the gentle case it makes for pursuing environmental action and social action together.

• The Burning Earth is available from Earthbound Books

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How today’s wealthy present themselves differently

A new book offers an engrossing but flawed takedown of britain’s most privileged.

Born to Rule. By Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman. Belknap Press; 328 pages; $29.95 and £20

S ir Peter Daniell went to Eton College, a grand private school favoured by royals and the rich. He was not a strong pupil but was admitted to the University of Oxford in 1927 after his cousin had a quiet word with a college. Daniell had a “wonderful” time there, doing almost no work, then took a job in his father’s financial firm. Did he feel at all guilty about his gilded upbringing? Certainly not. Meritocratic ideas were “damned stupid”, he later said, and nepotism was harmless.

Anybody expressing such views today would be laughed out of the room, including by other privileged people. In “Born to Rule”, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman, two British academics, describe how their country’s elites have changed since the 19th century, becoming cleverer and better at presenting themselves as ordinary. The book, flush with research, including more than 200 interviews, is superb—although like Daniell, the authors make the mistake of expressing their views too frankly.

The elite can be defined in many different ways. Mr Reeves and Mr Friedman adopt an extremely narrow one. Their elite consists of the people who have been listed in “Who’s Who”, a guide to the powerful first published in 1849 and updated annually. At the moment, this group has around 33,000 members. The authors are especially interested in a subgroup, the wealthy elite, with only 6,000 members—0.01% of the British population.

The great advantage of using “Who’s Who” as a yardstick is that you can see how the top dogs have changed. Much of “Born to Rule” is about this transformation, which is startling. The elite used to be thick with clerics and military men. These days there are lots of lawyers and media figures. Women, who were excluded from “Who’s Who” until 1897, make up one-third of new entrants.

Elites are also increasingly well educated. More than one-third went to Oxford or Cambridge—a share that has changed little since the 19th century, despite the rapid growth of other universities. Attending Oxbridge means something quite different these days. Elites used to slide into universities on the strength of their connections, chuck a few bread rolls about, then ease into good jobs. These days they work hard to get in and often work hard while they are there. Top private schools, which supply the elite with an alarmingly large share of members (though less than in the past) are academically excellent.

Above all, elites now present themselves differently. They claim to be working-class even when they are not. Their hobbies are now more like everyone else’s. In the 19th century the elite favoured golf, hunting and riding; in the 20th century they took a serious interest in art and literature. More recently they have mixed high culture with popular pursuits: Anthony Giddens, an influential sociologist, listed his interests as “theatre, cinema, playing tennis, supporting Tottenham Hotspur”.

The authors believe that this is a pose intended to make powerful and privileged people appear normal. They seem not to like their subject much, arguing that elites oppress working people. After all, they write, elites have cut welfare and undermined trade unions, among other sins. This is true, yet meaningless. Such things are done by senior politicians, who are members of the elite simply by virtue of their jobs. It would be equally true to say that the elite created the post-war welfare state and introduced the minimum wage.

In their conclusion Mr Friedman and Mr Reeves suggest some ways of disrupting the British elite. They argue that Cambridge and Oxford should be obliged to recruit at random from regional pools of excellent students, and that the House of Lords ought to be replaced with a randomly appointed senate. Those sound like excellent ways of diminishing two of Britain’s shrinking number of world-class institutions and enhancing the House of Commons’s already huge power.

And for what? The elites described in “Born to Rule” are too posh and too good at replicating themselves, but hardly toxic. The authors surveyed members of “Who’s Who”, and discovered that they tend to hold rather sensible, centrist views. Their attitudes to taxing and spending are about average, and they are more likely than others to believe that feminism is necessary. They seem to be growing more left-wing. Perhaps they are not just pretending to be normal. ■

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