and

Mansfield Park . The obsessional hunting of Anthony Trollope gave him much first-hand material for the pictures of the Victorian landed classes found throughout his vast output, but particularly in the Palliser novels. See also R. Gilmour,

The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian

Novel (1981). The boredom of Russian noble life in the same century is amply chronicled, whether in Turgenev’s

A Nest of Gentlefolk , Gogol’s

Dead Souls , or Goncharov’s

Oblomov . The equivalent for France are the elegiac novels of Marcel Proust. A somewhat fawning celebration of the exclusivism of English Catholic aristocrats in the 20th century was Evelyn Waugh’s

Brideshead Revisited , subsequently made into a sumptuous television series based on one of the greatest of country houses, Castle Howard. And one of the best-selling novels of that century was turned into a superb film by the aristocratic Marxist Luchino Visconti: Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s

The Leopard

is a marvellous portrait of a traditional Sicilian grandee confronted by the social and political challenges of the 19th century.

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