Never mind U and non-U. It's outrageous that we still revere the Mitford girls

We need to curb our obsession with the past and celebrate new writers and their stories

- Erica Wagner

Enough with the Mitfords already. We are still, it seems, in thrall to U and non-U. In 1954 Nancy Mitford - eldest of the six Mitford sisters, whose 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love brought her enduring literary fame - published an essay in Encounter magazine in which she laid out the linguistic rules which revealed whether you were upper class or - well, not upper class.

A pleb. Time to scrub yourself down? Better say you "had one's bath" rather than that you "took a bath" - didn't you know the latter was shockingly common? Sure, it was presented as tongue in cheek. Though let's not forget, fun fact, that Encounter was funded by the CIA.