Winter has arrived, and for the protagonists of this dance it is the time of maturity. Nick Jenkins is now forty years old and has returned to Oxford to write a book on Richard Burton. Pamela Flitton, the fatal, irresistible Pam, who leaves behind a trail of shattered men, has married the abominable Kenneth Widmerpool, who continues in politics, but tries to polish herself through a literary magazine. Meanwhile, Pamela cheats on him with X. Trapnel, a flamboyant, talented and shilling novelist who frequents London's most bohemian pubs wielding a menacing cane with an ivory skull in his fist... «An immense, dazzling work, that allows us to decipher the most secret codes of English society from EM Forster to Margaret Thatcher »(Andrea Petrini, Globe Hebdo).