Mastering the clipped tones of upper middle class English was a crucial career move for ITN's Trevor McDonald.

BBC: By BBC News Online's Liz Doig

The lead characters are two proper middle-class English ladies, played by Josie Lawrence and Miranda Richardson, who, partly to get away from their husbands, pool their resources to rent an Italian villa called San Salvatore for a month.

NEWYORKER: Enchanted April

Another group of researchers interviewed parents and children from 124 well-off white middle-class families in three English cities.

ECONOMIST: Private education

This should be enough to attract good young European players to sign on, and could even persuade some to stay on in a multi-ethnic city with a growing middle class whose lingua franca is English.

ECONOMIST: The Malaysian Philharmonic

His parents had been liberal middle-class, his father a professor of English and his mother a suffragette.

ECONOMIST: Hartley Shawcross

The son of a Chicago English professor, West made his mark by dressing preppy and wrapping about black middle-class angst.

NPR: Kanye West Shines