Reviewers may be daunted by a book’s erudition, but it is rare to feel intimidated by the violence of the language. Chris Bryant’s Entitled is disturbing partly because it is written in a full-throttle, high-decibel and thought-precluding rage. It comes as a shock that an MP can write a book so narrowly intended for people who already think like him, so crude in battering those who disagree and so set on polarising politics by assuming extreme, intractable positions. The polemical brutality of Entitled hinders free expression.

Starting his story in 679 and ending with the imprisonment of the rabid Brexiter Lord St Davids in 2017, Bryant is relentless in indicting his target class. Aristocrats are condemned, in bulk and with scant differentiation: they are described as ‘phenomenally self-serving’, ‘avaricious’, ‘insatiable’, ‘self-regarding’, ‘struttingly prided’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘sneer[ing] at those without money or title’. Phrases like ‘over-vaunting ambition’ and ‘patrician elitism’ are flung like poison darts. Their ‘narcissism and inbreeding’ endowed them with overweening entitlement, which in turn engendered ‘greed, licentiousness, violence, mendacity’ and other vices. ‘For much of their history they were a perpetual grievance machine, standing on their dignity, asserting their private rights and privileges, and instigating unnecessary wars at home and abroad.’ More than 400 pages belittling any social group – the jobless, judges, GCSE candidates, office workers, EU citizens, toffs – makes for ugly reading and ought to be unacceptable. 

Bryant doesn’t do irony. Moral ambiguity is disallowed. There is never a joke. In denouncing ‘the corporate intellectual delinquency of the peerage’, no mercy is given to the poets, scientists, philosophers, archaeologists, social reformers and connoisseurs who held peerages. In an astounding judgement on an epoch of rebellions, executions and