A Dance to the Music of Time

Anthony Powells majestic sweep never falters in this epic compendium. Twelve full length novels, written over a period of some 25 years, encompass perfectly the momentus changes in Great Britain over the course of the 20th Century. Not however in a dry and lifeless historical sense, but through the eyes of the individuals who are swept up in the maelstrom of change to which their middleupper class lives are subjected. It is no exaggeration to say that as a hugely entertaining, thoroughly absorbing and wonderfully instructive insight into a massively influential, and now largely extinct, element of British society it is peerless. From "A Question of Upbringing" with its wonderful depictions of schooldays in Edwardian England to the piercingly accurate portrait of the"swinging sixties" evinced by "Hearing Secret Harmonies" this is sophisticated, rewarding reading at its very best. The creation of what is surely one of the great comic geniuses of literature, albeit an unwitting one, in Kenneth Widmerpool is matched, counterpointed, by the suave subtle observation, almost Saki like, of Nicholas Jenkins throughout what clearly is going to continue to be regarded as one of the greatest fictional prizes in the literary Pantheon of the 20th Century.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.