At Lady Molly’s is the fourth volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time. Nick Jenkins’ account of his life has reached the mid-1930s. By now even the most unlikely candidates for marriage – Nick himself, and his awkward friend Kenneth Widermerpool – are contemplating settling down.

Mildred Haycock, Widermerpool’s intended, is the sister of Bertha Conyers, wife of General Aylmer Conyers, old friends of Nick’s family. This family is a tangled, extended thing, a sprawling mass of relations, friends, and friends who are distant relations.

Uneasy, ill-defined family relationships dominate At Lady Molly’s. You might say the books ‘philosophy’ of relationships centres itself on General Conyers – a former military man who spends his retirement pursuing two hobbies – breeding poodles as gun dogs and studying psychology. Often his insights into personality types seem perceptive. On the other hand, his psychological categories don’t seem to do justice to quirky individuals – tellingly. Conyers’ interest in breeding poodle gun dogs is an exercise in mixing up categories.

In some ways, At Lady Molly’s is superficial in its approach, like General Conyer’s retirement psychology. But somehow, the unassuming reflections of Nick, our narrator, catch perfectly that element of subjectivity in human behaviour, the way people shape experience according to their own superficial whims, likes and dislikes. Nick’s laid-back reflections do gain a kind of depth, which a more objective psychological text book, or personality study, would lack. The thing is people find it fundamentally hard to be objective.

As with the previous books in the series, I loved At Lady Molly’s, an entertaining soap opera, full of fun and sly humour, with something insightful to say about how people view the world.