This bag of books about grandees and gentry, peers and plutocrats, servants and society is reminiscent of a bundle reviewed by Prof. Spring sixteen years ago. 1 Inevitably, books gathered together for such a purpose tend to be collected on a somewhat haphazard basis. But this particular comparison reveals much about developments in the historiography of the English upper classes over the last decade and a half. Apart from a few tantalizing articles, published work on the aristocracy by historians had hardly appeared at the time of Spring's review. 2 Eight of the books he examined were the annals of ageing aristocrats; four were concerned with society figures of the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras; and the last was an edited version of the letters of Lady Cunard to George Moore. Far from being works of historical scholarship themselves, they represented one kind 1 David Spring, 'The role of the aristocracy in the late nineteenth century', Victorian Studies, iv, 1 (i960).