It is [the] self-conscious concern about how to balance obligations which provides a theme for Miss Howard's [After Julius], and it is by exploring the repercussions, twenty years later, of one man's grand gesture of self-sacrifice that she questions whether the idealist, concerned with saving the world rather than those he loves, has the right to such a choice.

At the time of Dunkirk, Julius, a guilty survivor of the First World War, had quietly equipped a small boat, crossed the Channel, picked up three men, and died of bullet wounds before regaining Newhaven, leaving a young widow and two daughters. Esme, now fifty-eight, is preparing her comfortable Sussex house for weekend guests, among them Felix, the young doctor with whom she had been having an affair at the time of her husband's death, who had reacted to the news that she was now free by volunteering for...