In spite of being asthmatic, a mummy's boy and, in time, Dreyfusard, Proust loved his spell of military training. Saint-Loup, who falls in the Great War, is, with Swann, the most sympathetic of A La Recherche's huge cast of characters. Brought up at Stonehurst, near Aldershot, only child of a professional officer and his wife, companion of their household's domestics, Nick is more ambiguous about the army. He is fascinated by Vigny's Servitude et Grandeur Militaire, the soldier's art, and by the prima donna-ish behaviour of all generals. Most of the second war, which he strove so hard to serve in, proved frustrating for him. Among Powell's many gifts, one he shares with film-makers Antonioni and Rohmer, is an ability to render the state of boredom in a sad or comic but utterly unboring way. Castlemallock, in Northern Ireland, is where most of The Valley of Bones is set. It is Nick's slough of despond. (Bunyan is an influence, by the way, especially towards the end of Dance.) The Irish have no charm for Nick, unlike the Welsh of his regiment and his ancestry. Nick's aristocratic in-laws are Tollands, wholly English. Tony's are Pakenhams, Anglo-Irish. No point in being a novelist if you cannot shade reality or move the furniture around. Proust plays similar games.  Swann is described as looking not unlike a portrait by Tissot of his real life-prototype, Charles Haas. Both writers love painting.  They use works of art to lend features to their characters. Stringham looks like the (wrongly identified) Alexander in the National Gallery's great Veronese. (Incidentally, how well the perfectly cast Paul Rhys played him in the underrated, slightly too short, Channel 4 soapification of Dance.)  Jean Templer, later Duport, later Flores, looks like a young and virginal saint in a Flemish or German Old Master drawing when Nick first meets her after leaving school. 

Five or six years later, married now to Bob Duport but not yet Jenkins's mistress, she has turned into a memory of Rubens's second wife or her sister, in his painting Le Chapeau de Paille. Odette, whose affair with Swann takes place around the time of the Narrator's birth — structural genius, that — is a Botticelli. Nearly 50 years later, in Le Temps Retrouvé, which my Penguin edition calls Finding Time Again, Odette still looks like a Botticelli. Alas, she has become a crashing bore. One of my regrets in life is never telling Tony of a camp parlour game invented by two dons when I was teaching at an American university in the 1960s. You had to render Proustian themes to the tune of "Colonel Bogey"; David Lean's film The Bridge on the River Kwai was not so long out. The first one was the best. "Swann's Way/A book by Marcel Proust/Tells how/Its hero took to roost/Racy/Odette de Crécy/Who to his friends could/Not be in-/Troduced". In a pictorial context, Violet Powell's illustrated guide to Dance is almost as indispensable as Hilary Spurling's great Reader's Guide. Let us make it a mission of the AP Society to get both back into print very soon.  

In his inaugural lecture in this series, Tariq Ali did a fine job trouncing the cliché, the inaccurate received wisdom, that Dance is about upper-class people or a confined world. This is as silly and partial a viewpoint as describing Powell's friend and school contemporary, George Orwell, as a science fiction writer or a writer of animal tales. Powell himself uses Proust slyly for the same deconstructive purpose. Again in The Military Philosophers, Nick has dealings with Lieutenant Kernéval, a Free Frenchman based with de Gaulle in London. Nick is amazed at the lack of interest Kernéval showed when they passed through Cabourg, with all its associations with Proust. "‘Doesn't he always write about society people?' was Kernéval's chilly comment." Nick runs into him again the following year, after the great Service for Victory at St Paul's. 

We climbed the stairs. I told him this was probably the last time we should meet officially.

"You know that French writer you spoke about? Something to do with a plage in Normandie?"

"Proust?"

"That's the one. I've been into it about him. He's not taught in the schools."

Kernéval looked severe. He implied that the standards of literature must be kept high.