They “confirm, if any confirmation were needed, his ineradicable grounding in the Edwardian world of his boyhood. … Cold weather is ‘beastly’, while ‘monstrous’ can be applied to anything from a slag heap to the remnant of a pie left in a lodging house pantry. From his upbringing, too, comes that infallible habit of trying to ‘place’ people … and – for all the instinctive fair-mindedness – arriving at a judgement based on class or gender divides.”