July 30, 1951

David Kynaston (July 30, 1951) was, we read in his Who's Who profile, born in Aldershot, England and is the father of two sons and a daughter. He went to Oxford and in addition to writing histories which focus on modern Britain, he is on the faculty of Kingston University.

His bibliography includes:

King Labour, (1976);
The City of London, vol. 1, (1994), vol. 2, (1995), vol. 3, (1999), vol. 4, (2001); (ed jtly) ;
Austerity Britain: 1945-1951, (2007);
Family Britain:1951-1957, (2009);
Modernity Britain 1957-1962, Book One, (2013), Book Two, (2014)

These vignettes from Family Britain are interesting in themselves, like this discussion of the British awareness of class. 

"The...English had [an appetite] for placing...[others] whose hands, faces, accents, clothes and bearing would, if studied with sufficient attention, reveal valuable items of information...the most important being...[their] social class..."

Kynaston is quoting Dan Jacobson, the writer, and the rest of the quote uses a metaphor for this evaluation activity; it is like "a cat sniffing a person's shoes."

Kynaston sounds unaware of the imprecision of Jacobson's picture. Dogs sniff to determine their position in a pack, and that is presumably Jacobson's point.  Cats have different, simpler, motives for olfactory investigations. The feline may be interested in  the proximity of food, but they are not involved in any pack activity. 

According to Doris Lessing, this awareness of class among her countrymen, was shocking to colonials who arrived in the capital.