Books like The Gentry: Stories of the English

I found it rather odd that a member of the gentry (in 2008 the author succeeded his cousin to become the 5th Baron Carnock, despite not using the title) should write a book on the gentry without disclosing his own membership to the social class or group, if you will, however you choose to define it. Of course any reader can find out about the author's background with a quick Google search (details of the author's life are very easily available from a quick online search thanks to his, shall we say quirky, ex-wife who has been rather forthcoming with details of their marriage to the media, as well as of course, his other books about his gentry background and estate, such as: Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History, 2008) and I understand that the book wasn't meant to be about him, but even a small mention of a possible conflict of interest or bias (I wouldn't have even minded if he decided to call it an “insider's perspective”) in the introduction would have sufficed. Not that revealing your bias automatically cleanses you of it, but it does add something to the overall credibility of the work. Maybe I'm just being petty, but the omission of the author's background made me both suspicious and curious about the motivations behind it. Surely it couldn't have been accidental. Did the author imagine that any reader who would decide to read this book would already be familiar with him and his other work (or know him as a public persona from TV, or perhaps be a part of his gentry world)? Did he assume his readership to be such a predictable bunch that it would be safe to assume that if they read this book, they surely would have already read his previous work? And that this readership would also presumably not have any qualms about the omission of this little detail? And what about a reader without that prior knowledge? Does their potential disapproval of the omission not matter to the author? Or is it the opposite: is the author so self-conscious of readers judging the credibility of his research and his choice of which records, letters and documents to either include or omit from the stories that he would much rather the reader either forget his bias if they are familiar with his background, or, if they aren't already familiar with it, all the better, why inform them of it? In any case, despite having quite a few boring parts (about a sixth of the whole book is devoted to lengthy, drawn out descriptions of architecture, interior design and landscapes), almost every story had a few interesting bits in it, and a few of the stories were actually quite amusing. Apart from the last story about the Clifford family (which read a bit like an embarrassing, cringe worthy paean to the Cliffords, in which the author solemnly describes, in all seriousness, scenes that I would think most would see as laughable caricatures of the gentry, and abandons any kind of investigative inclination that he had shown before, when it came to the older family stories in the book, for example investigating implied family feuds, etc.), what I took away from the book was that the people in it were generally quite a nasty, hypocritical bunch, which is why I was so puzzled to read this line as a concluding statement on the character of the gentry:“[...] deeply competitive, hungry to gain advantage over the other […] ready to abandon allies in difficulty, but somehow out of that tussle and rage able to summon warmth, charm, love, care and beauty which is evident in many of these pages.”Either the author is delusional (and incredibly insulated in his own little gentry bubble), or I completely misread the whole book. How could these characteristics not be seen as mutually exclusive, at least to some degree? Unfortunately, most of the stories in the book followed this kind of pattern; the author would want to show a specific trait in a gentry family in order to prove some point, and even though the family didn't really exhibit it, the author tried to force it on them, presumably to make the book and his narrative flow. It's a pity this book had all these faults though, because it's a relatively serious, well researched and informative book.As a side note, out of curiosity, at the end of the book I searched the whole text to see exactly how many times the author used these words in it: Arcadia(n) – 4 times (he also has a book with the title: Arcadia: The Dream of Perfection in Renaissance England, 2009)Horatian – 9 times Virgil(ian) – 10 times