The Strangers All Are Gone displays the same desultory qualities as the preceding three volumes [of Powell's memoirs]: reticence, arbitrariness, sketchiness. No one would guess from these memoirs that Powell is a novelist of considerable grace and humour. This book is not so much poorly organised as not organised at all. Episode follows vignette follows reflection seemingly at random. It is not simply that the book has no shape but that it suggests a life the author is too lazy to shape for the reader…. The self-effacement is almost total, and an opinion or prejudice, when volunteered, is invariably conventional. Powell writes, as he has always done, about Time and Death, but has nothing to say about either.

Perhaps a clue to why these memoirs are so dispiriting can be found in the following apologia:

I have chosen to make a kind of album of odds and ends...