Glendinning played with a wild nervousness that I could not understand, though it was caused partly, I thought, by all the wine he had been drinking. In a very short time he had lost a great amount of money to me.
By the 1970s and 1980s writers were looking down their noses at social climbers, in plays like Top Girls and Abigail's Party, in which a middle-class arriviste serves cheesy nibbles and the wrong kind of wine.
America being the parvenu, most people assume that any variations between the two countries result from American innovation, to the (sometimes mock) horror of Britons.
For two years I was successful in this way. Then a young man came to the university, a young man named Glendinning, who, people said, had quickly and easily become very rich.