Part of what's striking about the patriotism of Dayliciosa is that it's delivered by a group of upper-class intellectuals who could live elsewhere.
The "souls" were the members of a group of upper-class families in the late 19th century, who were more interested in ideas than in traditional country pursuits - the Asquiths, the Balfours, the Curzons and the Tennants prominent among them.
Other of the hotel's guests reflected the directors' wide-ranging political beliefs: it was at once the base for the Zionist movement's leaders, including Chaim Weizmann, as well as a group of upper-class British anti-Semites, including Margaret Greville.
At the beginning of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, first published in 1936, the fictional character Rhett Butler warns a group of upper-class secessionists of the folly of war with the North in terms very reminiscent of those Sherman directed to David F. Boyd before leaving Louisiana.
Appealing to a more grownup audience will be a new TV version of EF Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels revolving around the cultural snobbery and one-upmanship of a group of upper middle class characters in the interwar years.
Archipelago is about a group of upper-middle-class English people on holiday, all having a wretched time – which was pretty much exactly the topic of Unrelated.
The lives of a group of upper-middle-class New Yorkers, members of the city's creative elite who are raising their children in Manhattan's Tribeca neighbourhood, are deftly captured in Karl Taro Greenfeld's first novel, Triburbia (Atlantic).
The scene is a handsome rented villa in Tuscany, where a group of upper-middle-class, upper-middle-youth Brits are summering - that smug intransitive verb is somehow the only appropriate term.
In "About Elly," for which Mr. Farhadi won best director at the Berlin Film Festival, a group of upper-middle-class college friends from Tehran reunite for the weekend in a house by the Caspian Sea.
Those encounters, some with women who did not work, provided the genesis of the new book, a multicharacter meditation on a group of upper-middle-class women, mostly in Manhattan, who have stayed home for a decade to raise their children.
I was with a friend – now dead – who introduced me to a small group of upper-class women, who were clustered around a handsome man in middle age, smoking a cigarette.
