The class quiz
‘Class,’ grocer's daughter Margaret Thatcher once remarked, ‘is a Communist concept. It groups people as bundles and sets them against one another.’
Whether or not the former prime minister was right (she didn’t believe in ‘society’ either), the British continue to be obsessed with their class system, from the very top with the aristocrats and royal family to the very bottom with the chavs and the underclass, with the middle classes in between, constantly jockeying for position.
How to play
Each quotation has a missing word or phrase – try to guess what it is. To find out if you’re right, hover over the blank. For additional information, click on ‘More’.
1 ‘The rich man in his 
,/The poor man at his gate.’
Cecil Frances Alexander
2 ‘Loadsa, loadsa, loadsa, money, money, money – I’ve got 
!’
Harry Enfield
3 ‘We are all middle class 
.’
Tony Blair
4 ‘I want to 
like common people. I want to do whatever common people do.’
Jarvis Cocker
5 ‘Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least 
.’
John Kenneth Galbraith
6 ‘It is to the middle class we must look for the 
of England.’
William Makepeace Thackeray
7 ‘When I want to distinguish clearly the 
class from the Philistines proper, or middle class, [I often] name the former, in my own mind, the Barbarians.’
Matthew Arnold
8 ‘Upper classes are a nation’s past, the middle class its 
.’
Ayn Rand
9 ‘In the Falklands we had to fight the enemy without. Here is the 
.’
Margaret Thatcher
10 ‘The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the 
.’
George Bernard Shaw
11 ‘Il faut épater le 
.’ [‘You must shock the .’]
Charles Baudelaire
12 ‘They control the people through the people’s own 
.’
Louis Brandeis
13 ‘How beastly the bourgeois is/Especially the 
of the species.’
D H Lawrence
14 ‘Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of 
and how little we think of the other person.’
Mark Twain
15 ‘Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle-class 
are incubators of apathy and delirium.’
Cyril Connolly
16 ‘Mi know dem have work, work in abundant yet still, dem mak me 
now, at 55, mi gettin’ quite ol’ yet still, dem sen’ me fi goh draw dole.’
Linton Kwesi Johnson
17 ‘The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the 
.’
George Mikes
19 ‘Come, friendly 
, and fall on Slough/It isn’t fit for humans now,/There isn’t grass to graze a cow.’
John Betjeman
20 ‘Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real 
by their great anxiety not to be thought poor.’
William Cobbett
21 ‘O let us love our occupations,/Bless the squire and his relations,/Live upon our daily rations,/And always know our 
stations.’
Charles Dickens
22 ‘The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they’re not going to 
, saying: There is life, but it’s not for you.’
John Mortimer
23 ‘The stately 
of England,/How beautiful they stand,/To prove the upper classes/Have still the upper hand.’
Noël Coward
24 ‘Just because I have made a point of never losing my 
doesn’t mean I am an eel-and-pie yob.’
Michael Caine
25 ‘Like many of the Upper Class/He liked the Sound of 
Glass.’
Hilaire Belloc
26 ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their 
. They have a world to win.’
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
27 ‘We of the sinking middle class … may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all we have nothing to lose but our 
.’
George Orwell
28 ‘The English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the 
in pursuit of the inedible.’
Oscar Wilde
29 ‘It is comedy from a new perspective. A lot of comedy is very 
, male and middle class, but this is different.’
Anil Gupta
30 ‘A broad definition of crime in England is that it is any lower-class activity that is displeasing to the 
.’
David Frost and Antony Jay
