You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. No stranger to the Rangers: in 1982, Diana, Princess of Wales was the perfect paradigm of the movement In 1981, Harpers & Queen’s charming Irish leftie publisher, Stephen Quinn (later the legendarily suave publisher of Vogue) told me proudly that Harpers & Queen was getting its own sub-imprint with Ebury Press, the UK Hearst Group’s book business. The book isn’t meant to be taken seriously, it’s just a really really hysterical piece of literary satire. Light-hearted social commentary. Reading it won’t change your life, but it will stop you embarrassing yourself in front of an upper class person if you are about to ask for a handful of serviettes because there’s no paper in the toilet.

In his brilliant book Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?, David Boyle describes how the “middle classes”—and his perspective is much more Sloane than Pooter—put a touching faith in Thatcher, the City and a range of forces that would hollow out their world, and leave them mostly poorer in real terms, except for the minority of winner-takes-all top professionals, City men, corporate lawyers and top 250 board members who’d scooped the pool. But they know that no one except their mums are going to feel remotely sorry for them. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.The Regency, which lasted from 1811 to 1820, was a period of great excitement and social development. It was a time that sprung out of deep unrest – King George III having been deemed too “mad” to rule, and his son (the eventual George IV) stepping in as Regent. Under him, Britain flourished, as the Prince of Wales assumed the role of patron for emerging artists, writers and scientists. Ann was born in London, the second of four children of a Canadian mother, Margaret Gordon, and a Scottish father, Andrew Greig Barr. Ann’s grandfather, also called Andrew Greig Barr, invented the soft drink Irn-Bru, which still has the Barr name on the logo. In 1939, at the start of the second world war, Margaret took her children to Montreal and put Ann into a private school called the Study, where Margaret had previously been head girl and had a house named after her. And the Sloanes moved. In London, they had to, as New People, many of them from Other Lands, took over those nice central London postcodes – SW1, SW3, SW7 – Sloanes had thought of as theirs. As London became the World City, the smartest bits were taken over by Russian oligarchs and Indian and Chinese billionaires, and South Ken fell to smart young European City types.

Ann Barr, who has died aged 85, will be remembered for adding the word Sloane – to describe a fashionable upper-class young woman – to the English language. Ann was deputy editor of Harpers & Queen (now Harper’s Bazaar) when her first book, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, co-written with Peter York, was published in 1982. It described in colourful detail what her readers were like. It was mischievous, gossipy and funny, like Ann herself. What mattered then was having a place in London and a foot in the country; a house, however battered, in

Diana was a major cautionary tale. Sloanes had loved her at the beginning (her ‘Shy Di’ portrait in that three-row pearl choker on the cover of our book said it all!). Peter York (born Peter Wallis; 1944) is a British management consultant, author and broadcaster best known for writing Harpers & Queen's The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr. He has worked as a columnist for The Independent on Sunday, GQ and Management Today, and Associate of the media, analysis and networking organisation Editorial Intelligence. The era of the Sloane Ranger was also a period of optimism. As author of the 1982 Sloane Ranger Handbook, Peter York, has put it: “The time we’re looking at, Britain was coming out of the terribleness of the late 1970s and an enormous [economic] depression. It was a combination of escapism and aspiration.” Does the Sloane Ranger still exist today? Downton Abbey, The Crown and even Megxit has led to enduring interest in all things upper class. The always dapper Prince of Wales has even launched his own clothing line. The entertainment industry now has an atypical share of poshos – from James Blunt to Eddie Redmayne – seeing as though coming from the streets used to be the essential calling card for any ‘authentic’ artist. And certainly it’s been argued that Kate Middleton, born the year that The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook was published, has helped revive the type, with Prince Harry doing the same for the men. Hugh Grant and then-girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley in 1997