I’m glad your enjoyed ‘The Dance’ (as aficionados apparently call it). It is a favourite of mine, I finished it two years ago. So many funny vignettes from the start (Braddock alias Thorne) and that extraordinary portrait of a Housemaster that is Le Bas. A party ending in a drunken road accident always reminds your father of a memorable night we had in Oxford that culminated in a scene at St Aldates Police Station that could have been lifted from the pages of the novel. Curiously, it also involved a man called Jenkins. And it is true, as one gets older characters like Widmerpool keep popping up again and again. Disappointedly, the book made Simon Heffer’s recent list of great overrated artistic endeavours. The fact that he also included ‘Withnail & I’ rather undermined any remaining critical merit the list may have had in my view.

I didn’t know his house was close to yours. Hilary Spurling tells an interesting story in her biography of Powell about his father, an ex-soldier who I think had served in the first World War. He lived in a series of seedy hotels (like Jenkin’s Uncle Giles) complaining bitterly about his penury while having to put Powell through Eton and Oxford. He was then horrified when Powell told him he wanted to be a writer and the ongoing support that would entail. Eventually he died in a grotty boarding house just as his landlady was about to evict him. Powell went with a heavy heart to his solicitor, expecting a legacy of bills, only to find that he had been left a small fortune, enough to buy the house in Somerset. That, in itself, is a particularly English story.

I imagine they would be great novels to travel with, as long as they didn’t make you homesick. I had one battered P.G. Wodehouse (‘Uncle Fred in the Springtime’) on my travels around South America. I probably read it ten or eleven times, it got me through many a rough spot.

Happy New Year

Dom