In recent years, I’ve got to know the people at Debrett’s, who publish People of Today, which has always been a tiny bit more democratic than Who’s Who.   It was first published in 1982 and used to sit on the shelf besides Who’s Who in those long-forgotten, pre-digital days when one needed to find out who somebody was, their career and what they had published, plus hobbies.   The firm was founded by John Debrett, the son of a Huguenot cook, Jean de Bret.   Debrett worked for John Davis, a bookseller in Piccadilly.   The New Peerage first appeared in 1769, a year after the Royal Academy, and maybe belongs to the same era of grand systems of social stratification and the policing of professional boundaries.   Now, they have set up a foundation which is dedicated to doing precisely the opposite, encouraging young people from underprivileged backgrounds to go to the best universities.