Powell also excelled at depicting conflict within organizations, be they army, civil service or publishing. No serious war historian should overlook the 1944 scene in "The Military Philosophers" where Jenkins conducts a party around Field Marshall Montgomery's Tactical HQ on the Dutch/German border. The thumbnail sketch of "Monty" is priceless. In fact Powell is good on all ranks above and including general, a skittish class of men who, he feels, are best handled with the sort of care usually lavished on elderly ladies.

A secure position in the post-war world of letters allowed Powell scope for multiple in-jokes. Volumes 10 and 12 -- "Books Do Furnish a Room" and "Hearing Secret Harmonies" -- are littered with splendid fictional titles. Professor Gwinnet, finest flower of American academe, as prolix as he is gifted, is working on "The Gothic Symbolism of Mortality in the Texture of Jacobean Stagecraft" until he chucks higher education to become a water-skiing instructor.

A compilation of Soviet realist poetry, "The Pistons of Our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers," is considered likely to sell more copies retitled "Engine Melody" -- though the [Communist] Party will subsidize its publication, as with Vernon Gainsborough's searching work, "Bronstein: Marxist or Mystagogue?"

Widmerpool knocks out snappily titled magazine pieces like "Assumptions of Autarchy v. Dynamics of Adjustment," while Hugh Moreland considers the merits of leaving music and launching a literary career with "A Hundred Disagreeable Sexual Experiences" by the author of "Seated One Day at an Organ."

Paintings figure large throughout the sequence. Characters are often likened to faces familiar from paintings in the National Portrait Gallery (of which Powell was a trustee), though humor is seldom far away. Barnby's portrait of the model Conchita is compared by Hugh Moreland to the traditional pavement artist's representation of a loaf of bread, captioned "Easy to Draw, but Hard to Get."

Art provides useful analogies when comparing the lives and work of Powell and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh was fascinated by the interface of the "modern" and "savage" worlds; Powell's specialty was the overlap and interplay between the worlds of power and the arts. Powell's work is comedy, albeit comedy of an exceptionally dry type. Waugh's concise prose, supreme technical expertise and cold eye produced the more savage satire, but his characters tend to be one-dimensional; the bad are all bad while the good are faultless. Waugh is a caricaturist, while Powell's style is more that of a painter building up layers of glazes.

By the age of 45, Waugh had lost all sympathy with the world. In "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold" he noted his own "strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and Jazz -- everything, in fact, that had happened in his own lifetime."

By contrast, Powell at 70 could master the idioms of a traveling hippie caravan, circa 1971, without once being wrong-footed. In "Hearing Secret Harmonies," he catches the attitudes, rhythms of speech and conventions of cool of an exclusive and deliberately provocative clique 50 years his junior, with the same laconic accuracy and insight he applied to his Etonian coevals of 1920.

One of Powell's most quotable maxims holds that nothing dates individuals more precisely than the standards against which they choose to rebel. In "Harmonies," the charismatic cult leader, Scorpio Murtlock, claims to be a reincarnation of a figure from a distant epoch of the "Dance," the magical practitioner Dr. Trelawney. Post-war children who lived the vagabond life in the early 1970s will be reminded of the hypnotic, revolving-eyed acid charlatans who frequently claimed direct descent from Aleister Crowley, as they led the weak and gullible into the wilderness of fifth-rate occultism and sexual personality cults.

By purest chance -- the sort of coincidence that drives Powell's work -- I knew a relatively benign acid cult that occupied a farmhouse commune, during the years in which the final volume was being written. Last summer, visiting the place to see what had become of it, I discovered the farmhouse lay just two-and-a-half miles from the Chantry -- Powell's Somerset home since 1952.

Powell doesn't just get the dropouts right, he even manages to describe their various methods of reintegration, as one by one they abandon ego loss and drop back into more lucrative occupations. But one character keeps clumsily moving forward. Ken, now Lord Widmerpool, abjures the realm of the Great and the Good to obey the Will of "Scorp" Murtlock and embrace the cult of "Harmony."

Widmerpool represents Powell's approach: the symmetry of the dance to the music of time, the complexity and completeness of character, only possible because of the massive canvas that Powell sets himself to cover. His admiration for Proust and the similarly huge "A la recherche du temps perdu" is clearly and poignantly expressed in the section where, during the war, he stays the night as accompanying officer to foreign military attachis on a tour of the D-Day beaches and wakes to the realization that he is in Cabourg -- Proust's Balbec -- now deserted in the wake of the battle. It's a passage of great emotion; Powell in his novel is telling a deep truth about himself.

But Powell was, indubitably, more fun than Proust, and at least as true to human nature. His books, indeed, do furnish a room and more than a room; they describe a whole period and its inhabitants with more truth and more detail than any "factual" account could ever do. When future generations wish to understand the texture of 20th century English life, their best source will be Powell, and "A Dance to the Music of Time."

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