One rarely hears the word ‘agreeable’ now, meaning pleasant or satisfying, but British cultural life in my youth seemed to be dominated by upper-middle-class, middle-aged men with fruity voices – Lord Clark of Civilisation being the paragon – who used it a lot, often contracting the syllables from four to three but stretching out the middle as if to compensate, the plummy sound of a-graah-bal expressing perfectly a certain cosy, proprietorial attitude not only to culture but to life in general.

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