The Memoirs of Anthony Powell Vol 4 The Strangers All Are Gone (1982)

Try to remember that all epochs had to suffer assaults on commonsense and common decency, arts and letters, honour and wit, courage and order, good manners and free speech, privacy and scholarship; even if sworn enemies of these abstractions (quite often wearing the disguise of their friends) seem unduly numerous in contemporary society.
--Anthony Powell, The Strangers All Are Gone (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1982)

This final volume of Powell's memoirs covers 1952-1982; Powell died in 2000 at the age of 95.  This covers most of the years when the wonderful series of twelve novels, Dance to the Music of Time was published but Powell says little about them.  Presumably those novels can speak for themselves, references to the original influences of the characters means little to one in any case.  During this period Powell was the literary editor of "Punch" when Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor (Punch was around for many years and I enjoyed reading it at the library when I was in prep school).  It's interesting that Powell talks little about his novels, for understandable reasons, but does talk a great deal about the theatre.  When his first novel was turned into a play he became very interested in the theatre and wrote two plays that he hoped would be produced but never were.

Like the earlier versions of his memoirs the fourth volume is full of vivid portraits of contemporaries, and their work, whom he knew, or at least met:

Erich von Stroheim:  Stroheim's method has about it something of Toulouse-Lautrec's power to impart by wit, flourish, a sense of design, beauty and universality to themes in themselves sinister and tawdry.

Kingsley Amis:  Amis's emphatic personality was at once apparent, although on this first encounter I did not grasp how public a form this would soon take, indeed to some extent had already taken.

V.S. Naipal:  Under much humour, understatement, irony, Naipal's excoriation is pitiless; a stinging call to order for a world still partly bemused by 19th century sentimentalities and optimisms, to which it has added some of its own yet more futile.

In the last part of the book Powell travels in Asia and lectures in America, with trenchant comments on both, ending the book with a meditation on the significance and greatness of Shakespeare.