Complex in design and teeming with ideas, [The Four Winds of Love] is perhaps [Sir Compton Mackenzie's] greatest achievement as a novelist, and certainly the most likely to stand the test of time in company with Sinister Street…. This chronicle of John Pendarves Ogilvie's life as he grows from youth to manhood and maturity in the first forty years of our century is clearly a masterpiece…. The immediacy with which the changing social, artistic and political scene is presented; the way in which all this is interwoven with the story of John Ogilvie, his family and his friends; and the whole organization of the scale and sweep of the novel, represent a triumph of the craft of fiction. (p. 7)

[The] novel is concerned with much more than … elegant variations on the theme of human love. To borrow a metaphor from yet another theme which runs throughout all four...