Word: widmerpool
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...Molly Jeavons' town house cops a packet; the hostess goes with it, and so does Priscilla Tolland. In fact, a head count shows that six previous survivors of the Powell epic are killed off in this novel. In Powell's war, only the rotters flourish-notably Kenneth Widmerpool, whose humorless egomania and bounderish one-upmanship have won him critical status as one of the great comic creations of modern English fiction. He is now on the make as a staff major, a virtuoso of bumf, and he chews poor Jenkins' ear in a war of total paper...
Patterned Spectacle. An officer sitting with his back to Nick suddenly swivels in his chair-and turns out to be Widmerpool, that inspired clown who appears in all his novels as Powell's satiric image of England's "new man." Some characters will presumab y never reappear. Others, notably Lieut. Odo Stevens, who falls in love with another of Nick's sisters-in-law, will obviously glide into view again in later chapters of the saga...
...seldom been done so well in English. There is a party at the castle of Sir Magnus Donners, "the great industrialist," who is widely suspected of odd but harmless sexual deviations and is easily persuaded to photograph a charade in which his guests represent the seven deadly sins. Kenneth Widmerpool, whom Pow'ell addicts have already enshrined as one of the great ones in the long waxwork gallery of English comics, appears as an ambitious officer with a rich, newly acquired military vocabulary. In his own phrase he is "up to his arse in bumph" (i.e., a busy desk...
...Widmerpool, a figure of fun reappearing in this novel as the "new man" of modern Britain. In the course of the plot he is taught that marriage is not an exact science but, as Foch said of war, "a terrible and passionate drama." Widmerpool is a bouncing, uncivilized young City type whose political sagacity is expressed in his plan for averting World War II, then looming. The plan: give the Order of the Garter to Hermann Göring ("After all, it is what such things...
...Nicholas Jenkins, the novel's narrator and a movie scriptwriter (as Powell himself once was), whose humor is a soft blackjack. When Widmerpool asks him what would be a suitable name under which to register for a "clandestine weekend" at a country hotel, Jenkins replies: "Mr. and the Honourable Mrs. Smith...