At Lady Molly’s

Anthony Powell has now published six novels in his sequence The Music of Time, in which he unrolls a panorama of English upper-class life.

John Davenport in the Observer described the series as ‘the most exciting experiment in post-war English fiction’ and with this book, the fourth, the author won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best novel of 1957.

The narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, having emerged from public school, the university, a round of London seasons, and the turbulent political climate of the early thirties, is passably well set into the upper crust by 1934. He is on the brink of marriage.

But first, as he surveys the market, he regales us with the spectacle of Widmerpool (who, if nothing else, understood the principles of self-advancement), as he balances precariously on the lip of a similar chasm. The crisp and humorous dialogue lends a satirical tone to this remarkable literary portrait of a decaying society.