Ysenda Maxtone Graham has narrated this article for you to listen to.

No one likes a blatant boaster. So, as adults, we learn that if we want to boast, we must be subtle about it. The way to show off without being loathed is to drop small details about your life into your conversation and your prose, to signal your taste, education, career achievements and social status.

Doing this is tricky enough for right-wing people, who need to come up with subtle ways of letting others know, for example, that they can afford private school fees, went to Oxbridge, shop at Waitrose, own at least one home and go on holiday in Provence or Tuscany. Words and phrases such as ‘exeat’, ‘scraped through my Prelims’, ‘perfectly ripe avocados’, ‘basement kitchen’ and ‘bumping up through the olive grove’ do the work.

For left-wing people, or ‘left-liberals’, as middle-class left-wing people now style themselves, boasting is even harder. Not only are they constrained by the ‘you mustn’t boast’ stricture; they have the added constraint that they must try not to show off about the slightest wealth or privilege.

You’d think, in that case, that left-liberals wouldn’t boast at all. But this is not the case. The urge to boast is hard-wired into the human psyche from childhood onwards.

It’s fine, if you’re a left-liberal, to show off about your intellectual wealth. You can boast about your deep knowledge of French poetry (‘où sont les neiges d’antan?’), your love of Beckett and Blake, and that you........

© The Spectator