"And the name of the brigadier at the Battle Clearance Group?" asked Cobb. "The tall one who took us round those captured guns?" He wrote down the name and closed the notebook. "You told me, Major Jenkins, that at the beginning of the war you yourself saw a Royal Engineer colonel wearing a double-breasted service-dress tunic. You can assure me of that?"

"I can, Sir and, on making enquiries, was told that it was permitted by regulations, provided no objection was taken by regimental or higher authority." 

Moments of rapture alternating with moments of utter banality make Anthony Powell (and Proust also, come to that) the compelling life artist he is. Colonel Cobb is a walk-on only. The social realism, social comedy drawing is what we expect from Dance. Cobb is an American and himself an ironist; here he is mobbing up British insistence on proper form. But does not the prose lift into poetry when Nick finds out where he is?  

I do not think A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is an influence on Dance exactly.  That would be like saying Marcel was an influence on Nick, or on Tony, as a person.   Dance is even more closely autobiographical in narrative outline than A La Recherche. It is rather that Proust, like Poussin, showed our narrator his way out of the dark wood of the middle years. Tony, and Nick, had to devise what to do after five novels, six years of war, and a study of Richard Burton in real life, a study of the 17th- century memorialist John Aubrey. Powell chooses Proust more as a companion, a Virgil for his Dante, than as a literary model.  Dance is much more tightly constructed than A La Recherche. Powell's friend and contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, thought it much funnier. Earlier in The Military Philosophers (one of the greatest books of the sequence, by the way; if, like me, you have worked in government, you will at once recognise how immaculate is Powell's command of bureaucratic obfuscation and procrastination — he pre-dates the Sir Humphrey series by many years in this regard; the book is also, in spite of the war coming to an end, a dark one, as we lose both Templer and Stringham), Nick reads a passage from Remembrance of Things Past, as he calls it, which describes Prince Odoacer at the Princesse de Guermantes's party. He does so because the Prince, Gogo to his pals, is a great-uncle of the Dance character Prince Theodoric. What is going on, however, is a skilful and subtle literary joke: Dante joshing Virgil as they proceed through the middle of the way.  There is no Prince Odoacer in A La Recherche and Nick is reading a passage invented by his creator. Both Powell and Proust were accomplished parodists. Proust published many parodies of the Duc de Saint-Simon, his Virgil, so to say, or one of his Virgils, Ruskin being another. AP anoraks will recall that Dogdene, the Sleafords' country mansion and Molly Jeavons's home during her first marriage, scene too of Widmerpool's most spectacular sexual humiliation, was visited and written up by Pepys. Nick enjoys reading the Diarist's account of toying wantonly there, in a painted closet, with "a great black maid". It is doubtless not lost on Nick that Pepys's physical resemblance to Widmerpool does not mean he shares Widmerpool's lack of success with women. The Proust parody, or rather the Scott-Moncrieff parody, is pretty good; the Pepys is perfect.