Another title for this enthralling family memoir might be the “would-be-goods”. The phrase was coined by E Nesbit of Railway Children fame, who was also a co-founder of the Fabian Society, but it perfectly encapsulates the middle-class liberal-left tradition that Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee can trace back through her family for generations. As well as her parents and grandparents there are cousins and great-aunts, all educated, clever, public service-oriented men and women anguishing over a set of subjects that have only become more urgent in recent years: low pay, environmental harm, colonial appropriation and, most pertinently here, the way that social stagnation props up the political status quo.
This makes Toynbee singular and perhaps Toynbees plural sound smug, but nothing could be further from the truth. In her laceratingly honest and often funny book she illustrates how “to live on the left side is to live with inevitable hypocrisy and painful self-awareness, with good intentions forever destined to fall short of ideals, social concern never enough”.
