Widmerpool's egotism and will-power enable him, once set, to carry all before him, although before his ultimate downfall his powers develop in somewhat sinister directions.[1] In a review of the early novels in the sequence, Arthur Mizener wrote: "Powell makes his great egoists, for all their absurdity, something not essentially different from all the rest of us; even Widmerpool, the most extravagant of the lot, is not. However sublimely ridiculous he becomes, he continues to remind us, not so much, perhaps, of what we have done, as what we have, in our time, known we might do".[28]