Ralph Glasser's and Nicholas Gage's latest autobiographical instalments find their authors making good in their countries of adoption, England and the US respectively. The cost to each of their ascent from exceedingly harsh social beginnings has been different, but in ways that are not surprising: in England the struggle centred on class, in the US on money. Not that class and money are separable in either country, only that their precedence is reversed. Class - learning the codes of Oxbridge language and conduct - opened the gates to Glasser's professional future, while in the US Gage had first to accumulate the money to get a university education before entering the ranks of the middle classes.

LRB 7 February 1991 | PDF Download