"Snobs"

[fiefoe]

This makes pretty good listening material - entertaining without being too absorbing. Even more helpfully, Julian Fellowes ("Gosford Park") tells and shows in equal measure.

It's funny how much common ground this modern-day (90s, that is) satire shares with Regency novels. People are still going to the same places: the Ascot races, Claridge's, Brook's, even though presentation at court is not required of debs any more. Even the vocabulary hasn't changed all that much: 'interloper', 'solecism', 'I have known them all my life.'

What is new: 'stately' as a noun. Cute.

• I had known Isabel Easton since we were children together in Hampshire and we enjoyed one of those pleasant, undemanding friendships that are based entirely on longevity.
• He did not want to run the risk of meeting (the leading family) from the wrong side of the cordon.
• The hall was perfectly enormous, making the three of us feel like the Borrowers. `Well, they don't believe in the soft sell,' said Edith.
• If she were worth knowing, they would've already known her.
• (The state room) looked no less forbidding than it had before but the fact that this fortress had been breached made its very chill gratifying.
• The name Edith incidentally was chosen for its fragrant overtones of a slower, better England and perhaps, half-consciously, to suggest that it was a family name handed down from some Edwardian beauty. It was not.