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The main Unification Market, the hub for much of the private trading activity in the capital, is “packed with people and bursting with energy,” the visitor said, describing the “petit bourgeois” who shop there.

Beckham, like Rooney, was born of working-class stock, but his was the right kind: aspirational, smiling, petit bourgeois, of the affluent South East.

Her own origins were lower middle class, petit bourgeois: she had an uncle who was a doctor—the star of the family—but neither of her parents had gone to university.

Yet today, when novels “about nothing” abound, a “small affair” seems the perfect size to skewer petit bourgeois pretensions.

This is not to say that the way I thought of Calcutta was joyless; in fact, my sense of the commonplace aspects of its petit bourgeois life was fundamentally joyful.