Anthony Powell (1905–2000) has often been described as ‘the English Proust’, though this idle comparison did not find much favour with the author of A Dance to the Music of Time. ‘For a start,’ he used to say, ‘I am not homosexual.’ Yet in this long-awaited third and final volume of Powell’s critical writings (the first two, Miscellaneous Verdicts and Under Review, appeared back in the early 1990s), I was struck by a passage in Powell’s review of Proust’s attack on the insufferable nineteenth-century ‘academic’ critic Sainte-Beuve: ‘Proust gives Sainte-Beuve a tremendous knocking-about, incidentally expressing a great many of his own views about life and letters, notable not only for their subtlety but also for their humour and common sense.’

This could equally well have been written about Powell himself as a critic. His reviews are splendidly robust and bracing: he knew his own mind and he was endlessly fascinated by the vagaries of human nature. Unlike, say, Edward FitzGerald – who, as Powell observes, was ‘not in the least