Middle-class elite

Fritz grew into a talkative, energetic teenager, an enthusiastic student but not a spectacularly gifted one. Fie soaked up everything available to an upper-middle-class boy in Breslau theater, an education heavy in classical philosophy and literature at the elite school known as the Gymnasium, and hours of friendly debate and drinking in the city s beer cellars. 

For even if their personal and familial closeness makes them anomalous when seen in relation to the international avant-garde, it makes them entirely predictable in relation to the longer history of Britain s cultural elite, which has traditionally been drawn from a socially narrow, upper-middle-class metropolitan base. Writing as another insider, Noel Annan (Baron Annan), summarized the early twentieth-century British intellectual aristocracy in an instructive way ... 

Both the old landed elite and the new wealthy classes had feared the mob, and both had privileged positions to defend. Rather than fight each other, a process that occurred in some European societies, they built a classic, and for our time the most important, British compromise. The old interests offered a range of political and social concessions. The middle classes were given the vote and non-... 

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