The term “pro-war” must be one of the most abused epithets in our political language, but its use to describe Anthony Powell is undeniably apt. He was in favor of practically any war, provided it was fought for king and country. World War I formed his political consciousness, and he’d lash out at anyone who regretted Britain’s involvement in it — those, as he put it, “who waffle about war being avoidable in 1914.” He found the behavior of the Bloomsbury intellectuals outright shameful; in the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon he sniffed the mawkish scent of “self-pity.” The son of a soldier who had fought to crush the cause of Irish independence, Powell, even late in life, disliked what he called Ireland’s “national egoism.”

Perry Anderson, in a lucid essay collected in Different Speeds, Same Furies, thus remarks on Powell’s indiscriminate support of British imperial campaigns:

Vindication of the cause of the Entente remains, of course, the standard reflex of official Anglo-Saxon historiography to this day. Less common is Powell’s projections of it backward to earlier conflicts. The Boer War? “Even now,” he complained of David Garnett’s autobiography, “he can produce a paean of praise for the pro-Boers.” The Crimean War? “‘We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do’ has managed to get a bad name but was a perfectly healthy instinct, especially in insisting that the Russians shall not have Constantinople.” The Napoleonic Wars? Whigs who opposed Pitt were “near Quislings.”