"... expert manipulation of a vast horde of relations"

Last week I saw a copy of Anthony Powell's At Lady Molly's (1957) at Pulp Fiction Books and snatched it from the shelf -- guiltily, I might add, because although it is the follow up to the author's The Acceptance World (1955), which I read last month, I don't want to get addicted to its sugars, having read The Acceptance World only because I'd never read any Powell before, and thought I should ("the English Proust"), but really because my old London neighbourhood of Bayswater was mentioned in the second sentence, and I'm still trying to make sense of that time.

At Lady Molly's is the fourth in Powell's 24-volume "A Dance to the Music of Time" series, and picks up after its narrator has moved on from his past job and what I thought was his rather under-written, if not blasé, "romance" with Jean.

Here is a strangely predictive (social media>"journalism") sample from Molly's earliest pages:

"I was then at the time of life when one has written a couple of novels, and moved from a firm that published art books to a company that produced second-feature films. To be 'an author' was, of course, a recognized path of approach to this means of livelihood; so much so, indeed, at that period, that to serve a term as a script-writer was almost a routine stage of literary life. On the other hand, Lovell's arrival in the Studio had been more devious. His chief stock in trade, after an excellent personal appearance and plenty of cheek, was expert manipulation of a vast horde of relations. Much more interested in daily journalism than in writing scenarios, he coveted employment on the gossip column of a newspaper. I knew Sheldon slightly, one of the editorial staff of the evening paper at which Lovell aimed, and had promised to arrange, if possible, a meeting between them." (16)