Paul Johnson in Standpoint magazine surveys novels and novelists of the Second World War, including James Jones, Norman Mailer, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell, and Evelyn Waugh:
It is a mistake, in my view, to hold a popularity contest between A Dance to the Music of Time and Sword of Honour. They are wonderfully complementary. We are lucky to have both. Waugh did not cover so long a spectrum. But we should see Brideshead Revisited as his verdict on the pre-war period, which in Uncle Tony's account requires six novels. And Put Out More Flags is a knockabout farce, a comic curtain-raiser to the actual war beginning with Men at Arms, continuing with Officers and Gentlemen, and ending with Unconditional Surrender. All these titles are savagely ironic, the last signalling Waugh's despairing acceptance that there is nothing he, and any other honourable souls left, can do about the appalling state of the world which has emerged from what began as a just war.
I agree with Paul Johnson, although he puts it rather more elegantly than I would
The 'Dance to the Music' is more matter of fact, mundane even, than Brideshead and Sword of Honour
I believe there is a much more interesting angle in considering the different (and complementary?) approaches to English Country House culture between the wars as portrayed by EW, PG Wodehouse and Nancy Mitford; an interesting thesis project for someone?
I’d go for any of the Jane Austen books. They’re all rlaley good, though from my experience Emma is rather hard to get through. Austen rlaley knew how to tell a good story based on the observations she made during her own life, so you kind-of get a glimpse of how life used to be.