Anthony Powell has always tended to puzzle even while he delights. Wodehouse once said: 'It's extraordinary how interesting his stuff is, you know. And it just goes on and on, with nothing much in the way of scenes or anything'. Not perhaps a fair judgment on A Dance to the Music of Time—think of the party given by Mrs Foxe for Moreland's symphony or of the dinner at Stourwater at which the Seven Deadly Sins were enacted for Sir Magnus Donners's camera—the words might well be applied to Powell's four volumes of memoirs, though here it is not perhaps so much scenes that are lacking as the narrative impetus expected from the conventional autobiography.

That is reasonable enough; Powell has always been concerned with the distorting effects produced by memory. Now, in this final volume [The Strangers All Are Gone] which begins more or less in...