The wording chills me slightly, with its suggestion of a regular consignment of Eton scholars as if by a law of nature. - Charlotte Higgins

In north Staffordshire, it is perfectly acceptable, indeed polite social practice, to turn over a plate and inspect the backstamp if you are eating at a friend’s house. Because Stoke has historically had a rather stable, immobile population, memories are long and the tentacular reach of families into the pottery industry goes back generations.

But "the classics" are so much more than this careless and aggressive chucking around of Latin and Greek tags, as if they were bread rolls at a Bullingdon club dinner.

The classics and class have always been ­uncomfortably linked. In this country's education system, knowledge of the classics was traditionally the gatekeeper of privilege. If you ­acquired the classics (even as a humble stonemason's son, like Thomas Hardy) you gained a passport to the establishment. Fail (like Hardy's character Jude) and the corridors of power remained out of reach.