Fine artist, but a dirty old man

I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this:

Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended with a more temperate strain from the Mudge family of Basingstoke.

I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this:

Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended with a more temperate strain from the Mudge family of Basingstoke.

Those passages seem to claim too much for heredity, and to bear out A. J. P. Taylor’s dictum that snobbery is the occupational disease of historians. But there are some nexuses of talent in allied families that just can’t be denied — the blood cascading down the generations like rills mingling in a grotto. The most flagrant example is the Darwin-Wedgwood-Huxley pedigree. I’d also point to the Literary Longfords, the Amises, père et fils, and Evelyn Waugh, his children and grandchildren.