Anthony Powell's Century

"Powell decided to write "A Dance to the Music of Time" during World War II. He was resigned that the war would destroy the last remnants of the world in which he had passed his youth, and sought a way to preserve it. Whether he considered it from this angle or not, only an English novelist could have preserved that world. Almost anyone else would consider it a society too sadistic, selfish, and unfair to merit preserving. In an essay on Powell several decades ago, V.S. Pritchett expressed the view that the key English value--out of which all other values grow--is cruelty. 'To stand up to the best manners of English society,' he wrote, 'one has to be rude, exclusive and tough. One must be interested in behaviour, not in emotions; in the degree to which people hold their forts--and how much money the forts cost--not in what human beings are.'"