Volume 28, Number 10 · June 11, 1981
The Greek Conquest of Britain
By Bernard Knox
The Victorians and Ancient Greece
by Richard Jenkyns
Harvard University Press, 386 pp., $30.00
The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain
by Frank M. Turner
Yale University Press, 461 pp., $30.00
A notable feature of Anthony Powell's tragicomic saga of English upper-class life from the Twenties of this century through the Sixties is the near absence, in a masterpiece distinguished among other things for abundance of subtly controlled allusions to art and literature, of any reference to the literary and artistic legacy of ancient Greece. The few exceptions—a sinister title, The Kindly Ones, for example, or the disreputable Mr. Deacon's murky canvas. The Boyhood of Cyrus—serve only to highlight the fact, true in real life as in Powell's brilliantly created world, that the English generation which came of age during and just after the First World War viewed with indifference if not with suspicion that Greek experience which had dominated the thought and bewitched the imaginations of their Edwardian and Victorian predecessors.
Review, 4821 words
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