After a break of several months I picked this series up again and felt like I’d forgotten all the characters. But it was just that the first chapter was full of new ones - I think, possibly I had just forgotten them from before! Eventually the characters I did remember turned up again, a little bit older and not a lot wiser, though perhaps they are getting a bit more interesting as they age. Nicholas has found a girl to marry this time, the last one I thought he’d found was just an affair. She barely gets a line in the book so I don’t know how she feels about this development. I wonder if we’ll ever learn any more about her directly? Somehow I expect she’s destined to stay in the shade as Nick himself does. The other characters repeatedly move into the spotlight for a while and then move off stage again. I veer between finding it all rather dull and finding it a tiny bit fascinating as an artifact of the life of the entitled white male in the twentieth century.