[9] He is lonely at the private school his father's benevolent society has paid for him to attend, but ultimately makes friends with an eccentric boy called Mickey Wall, a civil servant's son whose contempt for authority and subversive sense of humour Osborne enjoys.
Through getting involved in amateur dramatics, he meets a girl called Renee whose parents are eager for them to be engaged, though Osborne begins to get cold feet about marriage.
Keen to get away from both the women in his life, Osborne enlists Arnold to persuade Nellie Beatrice that he should move into acting professionally; he secures a job with a touring repertory company and breaks off his engagement with Renee by post.
After the tour ends, he spends a period in Brighton as a kept man, working on a play with Stella, but Osborne finds her insistence on conventional subject-matter and playwriting technique constricting, and the pair drift apart.
Unwilling to live with Nellie Beatrice, he joins an acting troupe in Ilfracombe and gets to know an actor called Anthony Creighton whose unrequited crush on him Osborne tolerates.
He is living on the Thames with Creighton when George Devine, artistic director of the English Stage Company, accepts the play and rows out to the houseboat to meet him.
[10] Throughout the autobiography, he presents passages from his works in parallel with real-life events that inspired them: as playwright Alan Bennett says in an early review, through this technique Osborne is open about having used his life as literary material.
[11] John Lahr in The New York Times represented the book as a return to form: "the best piece of writing Osborne has done since Inadmissible Evidence... A Better Class of Person takes its energy from looking backward to the source of his pain before fame softened him.
"[12] Alan Bennett, assessing the work for the London Review of Books, echoed Lahr's words: "It is immensely enjoyable, is written with great gusto and Osborne has had better notices for it than for any of his plays since Inadmissible Evidence.
[21][22][a] In places the book contradicts itself: for example, Osborne claims that the reason for his Great Uncle Frank's shameful and sudden emigration to Canada was never spoken of within the family, then in the next chapter says that this was known to be embezzlement.
[28] The autobiography was preceded by a screenplay entitled Too Young to Fight, Too Old to Forget, which was broadcast by Thames TV on 13 July 1985 under the title A Better Class of Person.