Although the title carries a whiff of hipness (it’s a song by the Manchester band Happy Mondays – the author once worked for New Musical Express), an unhipper collection than Wrote for Luck is impossible to imagine. This book is a field guide to an endangered species: the cultivated liberal middle classes, the kind of folk who used to write and read about themselves in stories that appeared in now-defunct magazines such as The Listener or the heftier broadsheets; a leisured, educated, privileged readership that no longer possesses the social and cultural clout it once assumed as its birthright.

Most of the stories unfold in affluent backwaters of Norfolk and Suffolk or in the more select London suburbs. ‘It was half past nine in the drawing room of the Allardyces’ house in Wimbledon’ is a typical opening, admitting us to a world of French windows, upper-middlebrow paperbacks (Captain Corelli’s