THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD (214 pp.)Anthony Powell Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.50).
In two world wars Britain gained the admiration of the whole world, but in victory lost (or mislaid) the custodian of its own soulthe middle class. Historians of this civil-war-by-attrition have necessarily come from the ranks of the defeated; one of the most skilled and disenchanted of these is a dry-styled novelist and critic (Punch) named Anthony Powell.
Since World War II (he served in the Welch Regiment and in Intelligence), Powell has resumed writing a series of novels in which...