What children know -- Arnold -- Harry : a social reformer's tragedy -- Rosalind -- Good people, bad parents -- Philip the child -- Philip at Oxford and at war -- My mother Anne -- Philip the father -- Rhodesia : many painful political lessons learned in one brief episode -- Josephine -- Escaping Oxford, starting work -- Philip : older but not wiser -- Work, thirty years later -- An ending.

"While for generations Polly Toynbee’s ancestors have been committed left-wing rabble-rousers railing against injustice, they could never claim to be working class, settling instead for the prosperous life of academia or journalism enjoyed by their own forebears. So where does that leave their ideals of class equality? Through a colourful, entertaining examination of her own family – which in addition to her writer father Philip and her historian grandfather Arnold contains everyone from the Glenconners to Jessica Mitford to Bertrand Russell, and features ancestral home Castle Howard as a backdrop – Toynbee explores the myth of mobility, the guilt of privilege, and asks for a truly honest conversation about class in Britain."-- Taken from dust jacket.