War & Peace Quote by Simon Raven

Raven frames his project like a sociological field report, then slips in the real charge: a guilty audit of inherited advantage at the moment Britain starts pretending it has outgrown class. The “upper-middle-class scene since the war” isn’t just a setting; it’s an ecosystem under pressure. Post-1945 austerity, the welfare state, national service, grammar schools, a loosening of deference - all of it threatens to turn the old codes of entitlement into something either embarrassing or useless. Raven’s choice of “scene” matters: it suggests performance, a cast, an audience. Class here is theater, and his generation is caught mid-costume change.

The subtext sits in the double “privileged.” He repeats it to deny any comforting myth that his cohort “earned” its position. Privilege is not a personal virtue; it’s an ambient condition you breathe in early, before you know it has a smell. That sets up the sharper question: in an “Age of the Common Man” (a phrase that carries both democratic pride and patrician suspicion), what happens to people trained to expect exceptions?

The brilliance is the pivot from diagnosis to moral inquiry. “How were we faring?” is observational, almost statistical. “How ought we to be faring?” is where Raven implicates himself and his readership in a standard of behavior that can’t be outsourced to politics. It’s an artist’s permission slip to scrutinize his class without romanticizing it or pretending he’s outside it: a novelistic mandate disguised as an ethical exam.