My grandmother was not nostalgic for her past. She had no desire to return to a world in which her aristocratic family spoke French and visited the opera while the servants who prepared her meals and cleaned her clothes could not read or write. She had never been a Communist, she said, but nor did she long for the ancien régime. She was aware of the privilege in which she had grown up and suspicious of the rhetoric that had justified it. She did not think class consciousness and class belonging were the same thing. She insisted that we do not inherit our political views but freely choose them, and we choose the ones that sound right, not those that are most convenient or best serve our interest. “We lost everything,” she said. “But we did not lose ourselves. We did not lose our dignity, because dignity has nothing to do with money, honours, or titles. I am the same person I always was,” she insisted. “And I still like whisky.”