Gentry is partly a lament for its subject matter. Nicolson is right to point out that the demise of the aristocracy has been greatly exagerated in that in more than 70 per cent of cases of landowners with more than 10,000 acres in 1860, their descendants are still in situ — a continuity surely unique among the world's upper classes. Of the gentry, who still then owned 40 per cent of the land, under three per cent have descendants in the old place. The aristocracy had all the strong cards when it came to survival — the scale of their land, the grandeur of their houses and the acceptability of their titles on company notepaper; in many cases they also had great works of art, which turned out to be the best possible assets, as when Lord Brooke's Canaletto of his castle turned out to be worth more than the castle itself. I remember arriving at Blenheim with a predominantly Indian cricket team and listening to their catalogue of Bollywood films which had featured the palace and celebrities who had married there. By contrast, the squire from an ancient family with a manor house, a couple of thousand acres and six tenants did not possess the ammunition to deal with fluctuating world agricultural markets and unsympathetic tax regimes. So they have largely gone, mostly replaced by yeoman farmers.

And, of course, the gentry often demonstrated a self-destructive degree of unworldliness which contributed to their decline. Sometimes their beliefs in community, tradition and religion generated an anti-commercial and even socialist tendency. This dimension is illustrated in Gentry by the story of Sir Richard Acland who became the effective leader of the opposition during the Second World War as leader of the Common Wealth Party which won by-elections from the governing Coalition. Sir Richard (a fifteenth baronet) gave most of the vast territories of "Aclandshire", stretching over three West Country counties, to the National Trust. But like some Labour Party Lear (he was a Labour MP after the war) he seemed to think he could renounce his property but still remain in charge of it. He fell very precisely into Voltaire's category of lovers of humanity who detest actual human beings. His concern for the little people co-habited with a fear and loathing of those between them and himself:

Smug little men and women with comfortable little jobs or fortunate little investments which bring them in three or four hundred pounds a year deceive themselves and . . . . disqualify themselves from taking part in the councils of the nation.

Do we, indeed? Acland may have got what he deserved (he taught in a comprehensive school), but his wife and children deserved better.

For 400 years much of the land was owned in England and much of the government was conducted, by the gentry. This is no longer the case (the hunting ban is the crude symbol of that), but, of course, it would be very odd if the change had not occurred.  But having acknowledged that obvious fact, it must also be remarked that there is both a huge legacy of gentry life and a successor class which Nicolson calls the fantasy gentry. The legacy lies in the transcendent truth, elaborated by my friend Martin Wiener in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, that English people have been uniquely dissatisfied with the statuses of bourgeois and professional. Our national obsessions with property, with gardening and with animals are surely a legacy of the gentry. The fantasy gentry are those who live out their lives on the land, but funded by pensions, trusts and dividends, indulging in a little shooting, some gardening and some equine connections. Sometimes their interpretation of this role can be surprisingly traditional. While jotting notes for this article I was contacted by one of my oldest friends, a former lawyer and investment banker, a man whose thoughts about spondulicks come with many noughts on the end. Did I want lunch tomorrow? If not tomorrow, then not for a month because it would be lambing time and he would be working all the hours God sends. On this anecdote, I rest my case.