For many, myself among them, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell were the outstanding English novelists of the middle decades of the 20th century, and I have been reading and re-reading them since I was a schoolboy more than 60 years ago. There aren’t many novelists one doesn’t tire of, but repeatedly returns to.
They were born within a few months of each other and all belonged to the upper-middle class. Waugh’s father was a publisher and author, Powell’s an Army officer, Greene’s a schoolmaster (with family money from the Greene King brewery). The Waughs originated in Scotland, Berwickshire farmers. Greene, by way of his Balfour mother, was a second cousin, perhaps once removed, of Robert Louis Stevenson. Powell, whose social manner suggested he was the most conventional of almost-upper-class Englishmen, was happy to call himself Welsh, a remote ancestor having been a petty king in south Wales in the 7th or 8th century.
