This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much,

much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. Hello, now my A-level grades were pretty bad.

Certainly bad enough, said my former master brother Francis to rule out any thought of Oxford or Cambridge.

Perhaps you could try he said for

Birmingham, you know for a place on their BA English course you might just

secure an interview and then it'd be up to you to make a good impression.

Well halfway through that eventual Birmingham University interview I I felt I was doing pretty well.

I initially felt a bit overwhelmed by my professorial interviewers bookline study,

but I got a bit of confidence back from answering the first question about my literary taste

I see I see you're studying Dickens he'd said you enjoy enjoying your reading oh yes I said

I mean I love Dickens because he deals you know with the working class with slums and you know and poverty

in Christ it's all very very real I said.

Yes he said and your other set author Jane Austin?

Oh I don't like a half as much, I asserted, now full of literary confidence.

And why might that be?

Well, you see, she's not so realistic, you see.

I mean, her books are full of carriages and balls and dinners.

I see, said my interview very slowly.

So in your view it's only possible to write realistically about the working class. I was unsurprisingly rejected. And when later on I thought

back to that occasion to that interview I realized that my crass mistake about realism had really been informed by a sort of common presumption,

by the romantic idea if you like that the working class is somehow more authentic, yes, more

real than any other class grouping. And I recall that

...