Yes it is nice that Powell (in his early eighties when this was written) has a pleasant life in his home in Frome, got an honour, and sees his friends. But we are asked to put up with rss the inconsequential working on the interminable.There is minor chit-chat with the great; "Antonia asked if she and Harold Pinter could feed lunch here today after the wedding of Matthew Carr (son rss of Raymond Carr, Hispanicist don) and Lady Anne Somerset, the Beauforts' daughter She said lunch feed here was one of her baits for Harold to come. The weather was stewingly hot, perhaps accounting for Juan Carlos looking rather grumpy. I should have been sorry to have rss had to mill about in Garter rss robes on such a day, but Frank (Longford) who was present, nearly my twin, as spry feed as could be." That entry is perfectly representative of rss the broad futility of feed too much feed of the journals.

Like this? Monday 19 June: "In the afternoon V (Violet) and I watched on (Live) TV installation of King Juan Carlos of Spain as Knight of Garter in St George's Chapel Windsor. Twenty pounds, one feels, is a lot of money for a valetudinarian novelist telling one what he had to eat, which of his friends has died or come for lunch, and for using the expression "one feels" like royalty But then Anthony Powell, he feels, is royalty. The book-jacket carries pinches of incense, promising "hours of impure pleasure", "infinitely re-readable", "enfolds with relaxed raffishness, full of good stories". But in the long run, it is hard not to conclude that having a happier time must be good for you.It must account for why Italian children are nicer than British kids and less likely to take to air guns and chopping the heads off the class hamsters. It may also account for why, compared with their British counterparts, Italian adolescents are more confident, more settled, more cheerful and (mysteriously) less spotty..

There is - think of it - no word in Italian for ''bedtime.'' This may all seem a bit cloying and over-comfortable. At the end of the book one is well and truly ready for a bracing walk or a stern matronly voice shouting ''Because I say so''. When Parks takes his children round the village, they are fed sweets and chucked under the chin at every street corner The weather is better The food is better They are not forced to eat what they do not like. Parks's father-in-law - and I don't think he is joking - claims to have been brought up in a household where in the evening the end of the salami was marked with a pencil to stop nightime nibbling.Usually the Italians sail through the contradictions. A certain instinctive theatricality, a happy acceptance of the difference - enormous difference in Italy's case - between rules and reality, between how things are supposed to be and how they really are, helps them Only occasionally do they come unstuck. The key dilemma facing Italians is how to live in a beautiful, spotless flat and yet spoil your child rotten.And, by our more robust standards, children are spoilt indeed - indulged, coddled, cuddled Everyone is nice to them. His central preoccupation is the extraordinary balancing act Italian society demands - and receives - from its people: the big-car, bright-lights, designer-label, gadget-ridden and exaggeratedly consumerist world of modern Italy and how it welds onto an older peasant reality of untarmacked roads and women who go shopping in their slippers, and Dickensian child drudgettes who serve customers in country trattorias.This contrast is evinced in extraordinary ways; often it is even seen between generations of the same family.