 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 . 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 " . 
