Hypocrisy in matters green is one of the charges (there are others) occasionally made against the Prince of Wales. The Mail on Sunday, in its most castigatory mood, was recently doing so over HRH’s decision to waft himself by fuel-guzzling helicopter to a social event hosted by Sir Nicholas Soames in a venue easily reached by car (or better still bicycle).

I read the diatribe on my recent outward flight to Greece. A few days later, while sheltering from the rain (as Oxford basked in sunshine), I came across a novel that proved such hypocrisy to be no new thing.

The book was Arnold Bennett’s entertaining 1922 novel Mr Prohack (later made into a 1949 film with a part for the youthful Dirk Bogarde). The hero is a treasury official who comes into a fortune and quickly learns how to enjoy it.

At one point he is involved in a motor accident caused by an alluring young driver called Mimi Warburton. The car is actually not hers as at first appears because she confesses to Prohack: “I’m personal secretary to Mr Carrel Quine [the Secretary of Foreign Affairs], and it’s really his.

“He has three cars, but as there’s been such a fuss about waste lately and he’s so prominent in the anti-squandermania campaign, he prefers to keep only one car in his name.”

Like so much by Arnold Bennett, a seriously underrated writer, Mr Prohack contains a great deal to delight. I loved Prohack’s reaction to a large luncheon bill at the Grand Babylon Hotel (a fictional establishment based on the writer’s beloved Savoy).

“And suddenly he understood the true function of the magnificent orchestra that dominated the scene. It was the function of a brass band at a quack dentist’s booth in a fair – to drown the cries of the victims of the art of extraction.”