It’s interesting to wonder how E M Forster’s fey Edwardian men might have fared in the trenches after their author was done with them. What would George Smiley make of espionage under Donald Trump – and what sort of letters would Moses Herzog write to that grifting tycoon as he ascended towards the presidency? Fans of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet novels, which describe with great specificity the life of an English family and its employees between 1937 and the 1950s, must have wondered, from time to time, what became of Louise, Clary, Polly and the rest as Britain pushed through austerity, listened to the Beatles and dressed in colourful King’s Road fashions. 

Howard’s niece Louisa Young, who in a teasing author’s note describes herself as a ‘presumptuous nepo-baby’ before anyone else can, has extended the chronicle into the 1960s. The cast, already large when Howard started out, comprising five interrelated households (mums, dads, children) plus associated cooks, parlour maids, chauffeurs and nannies, is now much larger. The children have had children. The nannies need nannies too.

The Golden Hours begins on Christmas Eve in 1962, with Polly, one of the stalwart mid-gen Cazalets, hosting everybody else. She is concerned about who will sleep where: ‘Clary and Archie’s Harriet was to have gone in with Laura, but apparently the chimney hadn’t been swept … The boys –