As Brideshead Revisited , Gosford Park and Downton Abbey have shown, a fascination about the lives of the wealthy and the powerful is a perennial national pastime. So too is a sense of Schadenfreude when they run into scandal or fall on hard times. This book will seek to give a real insight into the development of the peerage in England, Scotland and Ireland, from Anglo-Saxon and Celtic times up until the present. Although it will include an exploration of the political significance of the peerage in the House of Lords, it will also focus on the social and cultural lives of the aristocracy. It will seek to explain how the aristocratic families of Britain came to achieve such dominance and how they retained their position with such resilience. It will explore their modern role now they have been virtually excised from the political sphere. It will examine the history of aristocratic ambition, snobbery and rivalry. It will lay bare the politics of envy that drove one local baron to fight another and the politics of jealousy that made a family guard its inheritance with ferocity.

And it will introduce some of the most egregious British characters: the snobs, the dandies, the rakes, the eccentrics, the warriors, the radicals and the criminals.