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Our narrator at age 15 falls off his bike. Commenting on the guy who’s teaching him to ride he says :

It was very hard under such circumstances to preserve the standoffishness befitting the vicar’s nephew with the son of Miss Wolfe’s bailiff

He is an appalling entitled supercilious snob who says stuff like

I did not like to run the risk of being seen with people whom they (his family) would not at all approve of

Or

They went to the grammar school at Haversham and of course I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with them

At one point the local coal merchant brazenly rings the front door bell at the vicarage where he lives. Panic!

My aunt…felt honestly embarrassed that anyone should put himself in such a false position

Because, you see, it was utterly ghastly and unheard of that a coal merchant � a coal merchant � should have the temerity � the barefaced effrontery � to ring the front door bell! What is this, the French Revolution? This grotesque bell-ringing even discombobulates the maid

Emily, who knew who should come to the front door, who should go to the side door, and who to the back

Well he is poking fun at himself and his family, we are glad to realise. Later he says

The reader cannot have failed to observe that I accepted the conventions of my class as if they were the laws of Nature

That said, he is the most worldly gentleman you have met in a long while. He knows everything about everything. He says

When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right

and

he had the peculiar manner of the country doctor, bluff, hearty, and unctuous

because he knows all about young people and country doctors and he knows all young people and country doctors are exactly like that. It is so. Sometimes his observations are not quite to be taken seriously

No one can have moved in the society of politicians without discovering that it requires little mental ability to rule a nation

- A contemptuous bon mot that I think many modern readers would swiftly agree with. (It also implies that he has, but of course, knocked around with many ministers of the government). But what about this one � it almost made me gasp aloud :

We know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me really an excess of chivalry.

Steady on, sir! This is 1930! Are you allowed to say that?

Unfortunately for Cakes and Ale it was one of those many novels that are about novelists, and I was sadly uninformed of this before I started, because I hate novels about novelists, what a tiresome genre. But Somerset Maugham is an almost funny constantly condescending avuncular hifalutin tale teller, and his portrait of a great-grandmother of today’s manic dream pixie girls was engaging. Imagine � a woman in a 1930 novel who enjoys sex with multiple men and doesn’t get punished for it! And is a thoroughly nice person!

This novel was plucked from the vast lucky dip bag of 1001 Books you should Read before Next Thursday. At this rate it will only take me another 135 years to finish the whole list.