The Ordeals of Captain Jenkins

Edited by Robin Bynoe 

Uncle Giles had a generation on his nephew, a fact to which Nick with his ‘beady Jazz Age eyes’ seems curiously blind. Nick was keen on the past but only really that bit before about 1750. A late Victorian, Giles’s greatest days were before Nick got going. His memoirs cover his service of the Queen in the East, his school days with Kipling, and his encounters (glancing or more substantial) with late-Imperial figures like Sir Francis Younghusband, Dr Trelawney, Buffalo Bill and Walter Sickert: some of them imbued with Influence, others less so. Needless to say, his take on events with which readers of Dance are familiar does not chime with Nick’s. Nor, unsurprisingly, does he regard himself as the figure of fun that Nick in such a ready (some would say facile) manner depicts in his book. It would have been surprising if he had. DJ Taylor writes: “A must for Powell aficionados and particularly fascinating for its alternative view of one of A Dance to the Music of Time‘s main stanchions – as if Sebastian Flyte had written a commentary on Brideshead Revisited or Alec D’Urberville been asked to supply an afterword to Tess. Other readers of advance copies report that it is quite funny even if you haven’t read A Dance to the Music of Time.