[Eric]

Cultural purity is like racial purity - it doesn't really exist. After all, one of the tenets of most civilisations is that you should marry someone from the next village, as inbreeding accentuates faults. So too with cultural purity. This is one of the reasons that Socialist Realism failed so dismally. The Hero had to be pure, and so ended up as a cardboard figure.

Class differences exist and will probably always do so. But that is why I believe in the kind of education where, even if you come from a working class background, you can, by means of scholarships and encouragement, get to a decent school and university, and can therefore escape the maybe not very stimulating environment in which you grew up. I know this from second-hand experience, as my grandfather was a coal-miner but my grandmother encouraged my father to learn. He got a scholarship to a decent grammar school in Barnsley (Yorkshire, England) and so made it to Reading University in the 1930s. He ended up teaching history at secondary school level. This was quite a social climb, in those days, for a boy whose father worked down the pit. So when I read Lawrence, I understood what was going on.

I myself have always remained in the middle class. After university I've taught English to foreigners, learnt languages and have used my brain for work, rather than my hands.

British class tensions are always there; some are even fruitful. Look at Lady Antonia Fraser (who was on the Newsnight Review last Friday). She speaks with the most lah-di-dah accent you could imagine, but what she says is straightforward. Her hubby, from a much more humble background, has written creepy-sophisticated plays, though he still speaks with a tang of Cockney. They form an unusual couple: East End of London Jew of Polish-Russian ancestry shacks up with a lady from a hugely rich Roman Catholic family of English landed gentry.