What we learnin volume 10 of Dance to the Music of Time

Returned to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, picking up with volume 10, Books Do Make the Room (once again, Powell shows himself to be terrible at titles), now we're in postwar England with narrator Nick Jenkins returning to school - it appears to be Oxford - to resume his studies - which btw seemed a long time ago, he's had practically a whole career since college and before national service - on something like the equivalent of the GI bill; a lot of the students are older, and it's not clear if he's actually seeking a degree, seems rather to be doing some research, on Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, of all things, The main theme, however, seems to be, in the first chapter, to get him in touch again w/ his favorite don, the cultish figure Sillers (sp?); Nick shows up for one of the typical evening salons at Sillers's rooms, events entirely dominated by Sillers, with undergrads mostly of leftist stripe taking it all in. Among several things we learn: Sillers has kept an assiduous diary - which should be a window on the lives of many characters in these novels - and he's working with a young woman, his "secretary," to get them edited and maybe published. There was every implication that S. was asexual or homosexual, but maybe not after all. The woman, however, tells him she's taking a job at a new publishing house, and it seems pretty clear that this venture will be the next stage in Jenkins's career. As in previous volumes: it's amazing what gaps Powell leaves in J's otherwise detailed narration of his life; his wife and children play almost no role and for the most part he seems like a single guy - to what do we attribute this? Is his "wife" a mask, much as Proust's heterosexual relationships were? Also, there are, increasingly, references to his life as a writer - the woman he meets at Sillers's says how she admired one of his prewar novels - but we never see his life as a writer (boring as that might be, admittedly) or see him engage in any serious literary discussions. I know Brits are famous polymaths, but can we really accept him as a published novelist? Finally, of course, everyone seems to know Widmerpool, who now has been elected to Parliament, which says more about Parliament, and English electoral politics, than anything else in the novel; much snickering about his sexy wife and how they can possibly work out their marriage.