Polly Toynbee searches in vain for one working-class ancestor

Polly Toynbee’s fascinating, multi-generational memoir comes with a caveat to a Spectator reviewer. While her book is written with ‘self-conscious awareness’, Toynbee predicts, with a cautionary wag of the finger, that it will be reviewed in publications where ‘introspection is inconvenient’.

Not a page goes by without a reference to the iniquities of class, accent, snobbery or patriarchal dominance

Of course, introspection drives her narrative. Toynbee, a self-confessed ‘silver-spooner’, was born into a family of towering academic and literary influencers who, while enjoying connections and lifestyles as posh as they come, almost consistently resisted and campaigned against conservative elitism and privilege. As with all families, these ‘crusty old relations’ contain two stories: the personal, emotional and psychological, and the context that predates our birth as it ‘travels up and down the social scale’. What is more, Toynbee asserts, most of us die twice: corporeal demise followed by the fog of forgottenness.

Her radical ancestors appear intact, with their wit, disapproval, passion, charisma, anger and sometimes, as with her ‘obnoxious’ snobbish grandmother Rosalind, extreme unpleasantness.