This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The tides of diversity and inclusion started to break on the fine old firm of Cranston & Tackaberry about a decade ago. Curiously, they seem to have had no effect at all on the career of Cecilia Featherstonehaugh (“It’s pronounced Fanshawe, darling”), whose ascent to the heights of editorial director has been achieved in spite of the considerable disadvantages of a cut-glass accent, an education that took in a prep school attended by the Princes of Wales (“Willy was rather a chum”), St Mary’s Convent, Wantage and Somerville College, Oxford, and a grandfather who happens to be the Earl of Uttoxeter.

Neither has the firm’s stated aim of producing “books for the modern age to be read by citizens of the world” had much impact on the kind of items she prefers to sponsor. Cranston & Tackaberry long ago broke out in a rash of Caribbean cookbooks and “challenging” memoirs with titles like Brixton Superfly.

Cecilia, conversely, is an old-fashioned exponent of “carriage trade” fare (defined as the sort of books bought by upper-class patrons of Hatchards and John Sandoe), whose list is positively awash with aristocratic lustre and éclat. Her recent highlights include a compilation entitled Public School Voices and the autobiography of a six-times-married marchioness. Both books sold rather well.

A neutral observer visiting Cranston & Tackaberry’s cramped offices in Golden Square, Soho might assume that Cecilia was a fish out of water, a dodo fetched up on the Mauritius Strand and, as such, ripe for superannuation and pastures new. Nothing could be further from the case.

What really commends her to her workmates is an insouciant self-confidence

Editorial assistants scurry to do her bidding; Sophie Cho, her PA, has been known to arrive half-an-hour early for the privilege of fetching her dry cleaning; and the firm’s 2023 awayday seminar, on the vexed topic of “Publishing in a multicultural age”, was held at her grandfather’s “place”. It concluded with a mass game of croquet and glasses of Buck’s Fizz served by the butler on an ancestral salver. Everyone is said to have enjoyed themselves very much.

Tall, statuesque, plain-spoken (“Just fuck off out of it will you, darling, so I can talk to Eric”), bearing an oft-remarked resemblance to Penny Mordaunt and supposedly engaged to a minor Royal, Cecilia is widely esteemed by colleagues for her lack of “airs and graces”.

In fact, what really commends her to her workmates is an insouciant self-confidence. Only the other week she blacked up, put on a corkscrew wig and sang a karaoke version of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” to a roomful of twentysomethings at someone’s leaving do, and nobody complained at all. Mysteriously, noblesse continues to oblige.