1st movement. A question of upbringing ; A buyer's market ; The acceptance world -- 2nd movement. At Lady Molly's ; Casanova's Chinese restaurant ; The kindly ones -- 3rd movement. The valley of bones ; The soldier's art ; The military philosophers -- 4th movement. Books do furnish a room ; Temporary kings ; Hearing secret harmonies

Movement 2. The rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of WWII. In England, even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices

Movement 3. Again we meet Widmerpool, doggedly rising in rank; Jenkins, shifted from one dismal army post to another; Stringham, heroically emerging from alcoholism; Templer, still on his eternal sexual quest. Meet Pamela Flitton, one of the most beautiful and dangerous women in modern fiction

Movement 4. England has won the war, but now the losses, physical and moral, must be counted. Pamela Widmerpool sets a snare for Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. It is a world of ambition, intrigue and dissolution set against a background of politics, business, high society and the counterculture in England and Europe

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