World War One inspired the British to short, shocked poetry, perhaps because chivalry was one of the first casualties. The literary monuments of World War II and the end of empire, however, are extensive prose sequences: Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61), Anthony Burgess’s Malayan Trilogy (1956–59), Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War six-pack (1960–65 and 1977–80), Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (1965–75), and J. G. Farrell’s thematically linked Empire Trilogy (1970–78). Again, the stylistic correlation between subject and form is suggestive.

The British fought a multi-theater war in a spirit of prosaic disillusion. The 1945 election confirmed that while Churchill had been talking of defending civilization and the Empire, the electorate saw the dividends of victory as indoor lavatories, free healthcare, and the reduction of the upper classes by punitive taxation. In 1957, just over forty years after Harold Macmillan had read Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound while lying wounded in a shell hole on the Somme, Macmillan the prime minister told his fellow Conservatives that “most of our people have never had it so good.” Two years later, Macmillan’s victory in the 1959 election confirmed that most Britons were glad to have exchanged the poetry of historical grandeur and industrial poverty for the prose of material comfort and managed decline.

They exchanged the poetry of historical grandeur for the prose of managed decline.

The war profoundly altered relations of class and sex in Britain. But the fictional cycles that narrated these changes did not