Heirs and Graces by Eleanor Doughty review what are aristocrats really like?

"Like any jargon, it's a system designed to dominate and exclude, dressed up in the language not really language, more like mouth-noises of the nursery, but reader, you do not have time to get irritated by this, because you will need all your resources of patience to get to the end of the sentence, without thinking: who cares whether he's the 9th Duke of Marlborough?"

"In the end, the problem with any history of modern British aristocracy like Eleanor Doughty's is not the implicit contempt of a class that believes in its own superiority to the extent that it considers the nicknames of its great-grandmother's lurchers worthy of your time, yet will look you in the eye and tell you that hard work and merit are all that count or to put that another way, piss on your shoes and tell you it's raining."

"The problem isn't even the posh-adjacent, their not-quite-aristo-enough army of admirers who'll die on the hill of these people being fascinating, in which Doughty is an awesomely diligent officer. No, the real problem, from a narrative perspective, is that every sentence is loaded with so much extraneous information where that character sits, not just in relation to the inheritance of their nearest stately home, but in relation to the queen, to their closest duke-by-marriage, to the second-cousin-twice-removed who would have pipped them to the pile were"

Aristocrats habitually broadcast domestic nicknames to the wider world, treating nursery monikers as social passwords that signal belonging and exclusion. The jargon functions to dominate and exclude, appearing as mouth-noises rather than meaningful language. Narratives become burdened with dense, extraneous pedigree detail about titles, inheritances, and distant relations. Class hierarchy persists through implicit contempt coupled with claims that merit alone determines success. A cohort of posh-adjacent admirers celebrates these figures despite lacking full membership. Storytelling clarity and human interest suffer when attention is diverted into minutiae of lineage instead of substantive matters.

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