The third novel in the "A Dance to the Music of Time" sequence, succeeding "A Question of Upbringing" (1951) and "A Buyer's Market" (1952). "The New Statesman" wrote dangerously: "This is exclusively a man's world. The women exist more for the men than in their own right, and the men find them baffling and incomprehensible. They treat them with the wary distrust with which the unmechanical motorist treats the engine of his motor car as something which has sudden unpredictable fits of not going, and then equally unpredictably it will start again, without even having been understood. But this is not a criticism of Mr. Powell's handling. Isn't it, on the contrary, a very exact picture and doesn't it make his novel more revealingly English than ever?