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.

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