Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. A cracking read.
Why do you have to get passed their privileged background? That is what enabled them to take part in all these adventures and instilled in them duty, service and sacrifice, for our benefit and theirs.
Even today most of the adventurers dead and alive are from a similar background.
Anyway thanks for posting about this book, the research is amazing. I am only a couple of hundred pages in so far, and just found out that Rupert Brook, he of.........If I should die, think only this of me.... Died of sepsis due to being stung by a wasp, and his piece of foreign field is in Skyros a small Greek island.
Great book! Good value for money too, with 623 pages plus 25 pages of index.