engraving of the "great chain of being" from the Rhetorica Christiana of 1579
frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651)
One reason why print-makers and engravers were often interested in depicting the social hierarchy, it is suggested, is because - as artists who were also craftsmen - they were obliged to occupy an ambiguous position within it.
William Powell Frith's painting Derby Day (1856-58)
"an unacknowledged conspiracy" since the 1970s on the part of both Labour and the Conservatives "to pretend [that] the mighty inherited social differences of previous ages are dead and gone".
London as the "Great Wen"
the split between north and south has been widening at a faster rate since the 1970s, not just because of de-industrialisation and the drain of money and talent southwards, but also because mass awareness of these things seems to have deepened
extreme economic disparities that exist between different parts of the UK
ownsfolk in Scotland and the north of England were disproportionately likely to see themselves as "happy".
The Full Monty (1997)
Yet perhaps what is most and unavoidably missing from Rank is the politics of it all.
The United States was founded on a revolution that abolished the monarchy, aristocracy, titles and primogeniture. Britain may be able in the future to become a more equal and open society while retaining all of these things. But this has yet to be proved.