While I would recommend starting at an earlier stage of Powell's intimate epic (a contradiction in terms? maybe not), this is essential reading.

_A Dance to the Music of Time_ is an extremely absorbing and well-crafted novel (composed of 12 smaller novels). Its subject is the decline of the English upper classes from the First World War to about 1970, a decline seen is inevitable and probably necessary, but somehow also regrettable.

Such a description might make the novel seem stuffy, but it is not. _A Dance to the Music of Time_ is at times very funny indeed, and always interesting. always involving. It features an enormous cast of characters, and Powell has the remarkable ability to make his characters memorable with the briefest of descriptions. In addition, Powell's prose is addictive: very characteristic, idiosyncratic, and elegant.

The long novel follows the life of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, from his time at Eton just after World War I to retirement in the English countryside in the late '60s. But Jenkins, though the narrator, is in many ways not the most important character. The comic villain Widmerpool, a creature of pure will, and awkward malevolence, is the other fulcrum around which the novel pivots.

This final volume of the University of Chicago's beautiful Trade Paperback edition includes the last three books. _Books Do Furnish a Room_ is set shortly after World War II, when Nick Jenkins is moving in London literary circles, dealing with such characters as the doomed, eccentric, novelist X. Trapnel, his mistress Pamela Flitton Widmerpool, and of course Kenneth Widmerpool himself, clumsily but successfully trying to maximize his political influence with the help of a literary magazine. _Temporary Kings_ features Jenkins at a conference in Venice, then back in London, and introduces a couple of curious Americans, Louis Glober and Russell Gwinnett. It also features the final destructive acts of the terrible Pamela Flitton's life. _Hearing Secret Harmonies_ concludes the sequence, as Jenkins rather bitterly views the radicalism of the '60s, and especially Widmerpool's usual attempts at ingratiating himself with the latest fads in power. The novel closes with a remarkable vision of Widmerpool's end, oddly, bitterly echoing his first appearance.

A great, great, series of novels. Incomparable.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that one of the greatest services that literature offers is the opportunity to experience worlds and lives not our own. This is rarely more true than with Powell's magnificent series. I had come to feel that Nicholas Jenkins's friends were my friends, and by the end I felt almost as if I had experienced another life.

If one is willing to make the commitment of time, I wholeheartedly recommend this superb series. In a hundred years time, it might be the single work that I would recommend to anyone wanting to know what life in the 20th century was like.

Powell is one of the truly great writers of the second half of the 20th century. His 12 volume Dance to the Music of Time is a monument of British literature.
This is a lesser book, but still great. No one writes what the English like to call Comedy of Manners like Powell.
His command of the language makes anything he writes a joy to read.

It is regrettable that Anthony Powell's splendid satire "Afternoon Men" is out of print. I learned of Anthony Powell's work through his obituary in The New York Times in March, 2000. Mr. Powell (the name rhymes with "Lowell") had been highly regarded as a brilliant author by such literary giants as Evelyn Waugh, a fastidious and snobbish critic who seldom had a kind word for any writer. Since I admire Waugh's work, and since he had read and enjoyed Mr. Powell's novels, I immediately read "Afternoon Men," a shorter work and, I might add, an excellent introduction to his vast literary output. "Afternoon Men" deals with a group of rather seedy eccentrics in Bohemian London during the time between the World Wars. It is peopled with those characters so beloved by readers of Waugh and Kingsley Amis: the bored, intellectually witty survivors in a new society, surviving through alcohol and shakey friendships with often disreputable people. Mr. Powell's satire is razor sharp, but not cruel, particularly when he chronicles the pathetic and disastrous love affairs of these vulnerable people. His dialogue is beautifully developed, especially in the several alcoholic party scenes that were a major part of this generation. The character of Fotheringham, for example, is a beautifully delineated eccentric who appears throughout the book and whose dialogue is tight, witty, and hysterically funny.(Fotheringham's dialogue was quoted by The New York Times in Powell's obituary.) Yet Mr. Powell captures, with a few literary strokes, the inner pathos of Fotheringham's character. The story is told through the person of William Atwater; the book is more of a character study of Atwater's friends and their foibles, eccentricities, amorous needs, and survival instincts. Anglophiles who read 20th century British satire will probably want to search for this out-of-print book in second-hand book stores or in libraries. I found a dusty copy on the top shelf of my local library that had not been checked out since 1949. Perhaps Little, Brown and Company will sense a renaissance of Powell's work and reissue this book. At any rate, I am about to embark on the adventure of reading Anthony Powell's masterpiece, "A Dance to the Music of Time," a six-novel, satirical saga of British life in the 20th century.

If you watched the December 17, 2000 CBS News SUNDAY MORNING feature on Lord Snowdon, you would have noted the photographer's humility. He denies photography's place as a fine art and his significance in his work - the subjects are what is important.

No person with an eye trained to fine art could deny the quality of Lord Snowdon's talent. As a fellow professional photographer, I aspire to capture the human condition quite as Lord Snowdon does. The reader will find a variety of work - black & white and color, famous persons and ordinary people, sharp crisp work to grainy impressionist. Don't look for any ordinary pictures - each is dramatic in some varied fashion. Don't look for sensual nudes - a couple of tasteful nudes adorn the book.

The photo selection is an excellent representation of his 50 years as a photographic master. The book's technical presentation is superb, in terms of paper choice and printing techniques. I eagerly await Lord Snowden's exhibit at the Yale Center for the British Art. Thank you for your wonderful contributions, Lord Snowdon, and thank you Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers!

To earn the reputation of a literary giant within the generation of Waugh, Orwell, and Greene is no mean feat. To do so with the grace and genius that characterized Anthony Powell...is nothing short of spectacular. This book of Powell's memoirs is the first one-volume collection to be published in America. The reviews for this book are glowing. "Powell was indeed a literary giant, and eminently deserving of the praise that was lavished upon him."- The Wall Street Journal. "A Master of wit, paradox, and social delineation."- The New York Times. "[Powell was] more fun than Proust, and at least as true to human nature."- John Perry, Salon Magazine

"Dance" is a monster of a project; 12 novels that feature a small core of characters that appear in each book and approximately 400 lessor characters that appear and disappear and sometimes reappear years (and books) later.

The first movement consists of three social novels and tells the story of Nicholas (Nick) Jenkins' life from his last year at school in the early 1920s (probably Eaton) to his life as a writer living in London and working in the art publishing industry around 1930.

Powell's style is very dated and ponderous, major world events get a sentence or two while a particular dinner or party might get three chapters. The really amazing thing is that if you stick with him, the series starts to work. The characters become very real, and despite the highly stratified nature of upper class English society he describes, you find them sympathetic and interesting.

A major plus point here is the wonderful true-life ambiguity of everyone. There no black and white heroes or villains in these novels, even the dreaded Kennith Windmerpool emerges as a real human being, with real concerns and triumphs and failures. Nick starts disliking him, never really warms to him, but like us, grows to respect his drive and ambition. Nick, like many a narrator, emerges as a somewhat passive observant young man although not without resources and a strong sex drive!

No way is this series of novels for everyone, but if you like good description, some very sly English humour, and believable developed characters in your books, then give it a shot. There are also some excellent resources on the Net that identify the "real" people the characters are based upon. Be warned, if you complete the first movement of the dance, you're committed to read the next three.

For people who like Jane Austen, yet set in more recent times, Anthony Powell's series is worth reading. The story lines are not gripping thrillers, yet one becomes interested in the characters as they drift in and out of the main protagonist's life. I picked up the first `trilogy' in the reissue of Powell's work because I had watched and enjoyed the televisation made by one of the UK's networks. All the reviewers said that the series did not reflect the depth of the books. So I read the books to compare them. I found that the television series mirrored the books very well indeed. The producers had caught the wistfull and distant mood of Nicholas Jenkins well and the dissipation of the upper classes between the two world wars excellently. Do the stories go anywhere? Not in the accepted sense of the word. They exist in a time capsule, for us to observe - a measured dance to the music of time, as so aptly titled. If you are a fan of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford you will! enjoy Anthony Powell, and if you enjoy these novels yet have not read Waugh and Mitford, try them as well.

For me, the most impressive aspect of Anthony Powell's *Dance to the Music of Time* series is not the hilarious comedy, not the dazzling style of writing, not even the epic scope of this series of 12 novels covering upper class life in England from the 1920s to the '70s. For me it is the astounding *reality* of the characters, both major and minor, who populate these novels. They become real people that you actually know, and their triumphial, absurd or tragic progression through this series is the most compelling and moving reading that I have experiencened in modern literature. Anybody interested in post-war fiction must read this magnificent series of novels.

This is number three of twelve in the 12-part "A Dance to the Music of Time" series. I found the first two volumes a little dull and slow, but I am continuing to read this series mainly due to Richard Horton's exhortations. With this book, I finally got a sense of why Richard keeps urging me along; something finally clicked. As characters reappeared, I welcomed them back as old friends, and didn't need to flip back to find where they had entered the story before. Jenkins, the narrator, started doing something, rather than just commenting on the actions of Stringham, Templar, and Widmerpool. Marriages were consummated and broken. Literary and political differences moved into the foreground of the novel. For once, I even thought I saw a plot.

I guess what really happened is that I warmed to both Powell's prose and subjects. In the first two books, I thought there were occasions upon which Powell waxed poetical--loving bits of description that put both character-building and story into suspension until the subject at hand was drained of detail. I am the first to admit that I am not one fond of overt description, but one can sit still for only so long before something falls asleep.

Jenkins and his contemporaries are in their late 20s in this book, which takes place in the golden years between the two World Wars. Trouble is brewing in the world, seen here in some characters who are pronounced revolutionaries, followers of Marx and Trotsky.

A quote from page 63 sums up the idea of this series in my mind:

Afterwards, that dinner in the Grill seemed to partake of the nature of a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time, its charm seemed to reside in a difference from the usual run of things.... But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned--or everything is--because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.

And, while I am in a quoting mood, here is a line that seemed apt: "There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you." Lines like that have me anxious to continue the series.

I loved Acceptance World, which has Powell's writing on the London art scene (hilarious) and his more meditative style at its most enthralling. This book occassionally puts Powell in Proust's class, in my opinion, and I wouldn't say that about most of the other novels in the series, as much as I have enjoyed them.

The third season into Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time" series, and I finally feel that I'm understanding what's going on. Powell's series is very British, and early on I missed a lot of action because it was hidden amongst the understatements and other polite forms of communication. I read this group of three much more closely, and I feel that I got much more out of it. "Autumn" (as my three in one volume calls this group of three) is the World War II years for Jenkins and his life comrades, although in the first volume, The Valley of Bones, we don't get to see too many of his schoolmates until the very end. Jenkins, who waited too long to join the British army and slightly too old for the rank and file, is assigned to a Welsh regiment made up mostly of the men of one small town. The lieutenant is an ex-bank clerk with delusions of grandeur, who is frustrated by the abilities of the men assigned to him as well as his own ambition. In some ways, this lieutenant resembles Widmerpool; both men are driven by their desire for acceptance by society. Jenkins, the bobbing buoy in the storm of all this ambition, seems almost goal-less. Even his previous occupation as a writer seems worthless in the light of war, and he flounders, searching for a place to fit in and make something of himself. The Welsh regiment is not it, and at the end of The Valley of Bones, Jenkins finds himself becoming an aide de camp of Widmerpool, who has become the Q&A (roughly, the military police) of a division. At the end of the book, this prospect seems quite despairing to Jenkins, although he is resigned to his fate, which could be worse, he surmises, but not much.

We learn much more about Widmerpool and his ambition in The Soldier's Art. Jenkins, acting as his lackey, gets first hand knowledge of both Widmerpool's strengths (hard-working, detailed, thorough) as well as his weaknesses (vain, petty, unscrupulous). One of the strongest scenes yet in the series is a segment herein where Jenkins attempts to help Stringham, who has recovered from his alcoholism, but only managed to achieve a position as a waiter in the Army. Jenkins wants Widmerpool to find Stringham a better position, but Widmerpool at first will have none of it. Widmerpool feels that a man must achieve his own positions, without any string-pulling from his friends. Of course, this is totally hypocritical--he is quite willing to let people pull strings to help his fortunes, and is willing to manipulate the course of actions if they are beneficial to himself (such as having Jenkins assigned to him). Jenkins goes on R&R, and when he returns, he finds that Stringham's been reassigned to the laundry on Widmerpool's suggestion. Thinking Widmerpool has turned a new leaf, he thanks him, then learns that the laundry is due to be shipped out to a nasty portion of the war. The strength of this series by Powell is that all the action above takes place in amongst three of four other developing storylines, including a rivalry between Widmerpool and a office at the same rank, a chance for Jenkins to get out from under Widmerpool's office, and the ongoing blitz of London. Keeping it all straight is difficult at times. Of the books in the series, this is probably my favorite or next favorite so far.

The "Autumn" trilogy ends with The Military Philosophers. Jenkins and Widmerpool separate, each into different parts of the military governance--Widmerpool into intelligence, Jenkins into foreign liaisons. Now that he's back in the city, Jenkins is reunited with his wife and many of the parts of society that being assigned to a country regiment had denied him. Even though the war goes on, and some of Jenkins' in-laws are killed by German bombing raids, the book is concerned as much with the love affairs of the characters as the affairs of the war. Most prominently, Templar's sister, Pamela Flitton, is introduced herein, and the information regarding her dealings with characters that we have met in the preceding eight volumes provides much of the plot. In fact, at one point, where Jenkins is grilling another character regarding Pamela, the character says, "Why do I need to tell you this? Are you from MI5?" because Jenkins, and the reader, has already tied much of what has happened together through the grapevine of other friends and relatives.

I don't think of "The Dance" as a gossip novel, but in many ways, that is how it seems. Action often takes a back seat to the machinations of talk, and the most interesting bits are the surprises that spring from how characters do not relate to one another as seen through Jenkins' eyes. Things do happen--bombs burst, sugar gets poured over heads, intercourse happens--but they become stronger by how they are perceived by the characters than their actual effect. I'm looking forward to the next few books, anticipating Widmerpool's fall from grace and some truth and reconciliation that ties up a lot of what has gone before.

Powell's prose is elegantly uncorroded by the modern fast paced advertising style, as suggested by his fondness for commas and involved yet utterly precise sentences. He obliquely approaches a bleak war as it was experienced on the home front, and in the rear areas frequented by his narrator, Nick Jenkins, a remarkably incisive yet detached and circumspect character of whom we learn very little of the quotidian despite his ever presence. Powell is a master of underplayed scenes. WW II takes some familiar characters in casually shocking ways, invariably reported second-hand. It may be offputting that locations and outside events are frequently allusive, depending as they do on the state of the reader's prior knowledge for their significance, dating, and rationale. (This technique is not specifically intended to reproduce "the fog of war"-which it quite effectively does-but is generic to Powell's style.) Then again, this chronicle of the decline of a group of classmates, girlfriends, and relatives from rather upper-class Britain is not intended for Americans. It is an intensely observed and analysed view of people doing their none too good best at trivial jobs. The second novel here (each about 250 pages long and separately paginated), The Soldier's Art, features Widmerpool especially, one of the most socially awkward self-important incompetents ever to blunder through fine literature yet inexorably advancing, earlier in trade and now into ministerial levels. By this the third book in the handsome Chicago edition, I am beginning to appreciate the low-key but thorough humour of this masterpiece, although French is needed for several outright jokes here. The individual novels progress from one set of character studies to another, set pieces in social situations (often society parties, especially in the earlier novels), with three to five of these revealing episodes per novel. In sum, splendid writing, but not everyone's cup of tea.

This trilogy takes up the war years, and Nick Jenkins' experiences in the Army. The Army is portrayed not as a fighting machine, but as a giant bureaucracy. Of course, this is the experience that many of the millions of men who served in the Armed Forces for Britain and the US had. The frustrations Jenkins experiences are similar to those described in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy. The emphasis on the bureaucratic aspects of war makes the success of Widmerpool -- in many ways the least military of men, and one who would be completely incompetent as a leader on a battlefield -- completely believable. Powell proves as adept as ever as a creater of characters. I would rate these three novels as quite good, but not as memorable as the earlier two trilogies. Even for Powell, the novels seem rather weak on plot, and to be more a series of character sketches. However, this weakness is overbalanced by the dry humor and the author's ability to create believable characters who are funny, and engaging. While obviously not the place to start, this trilogy is essential for anyone who has read Powell.

There are two hazards in reading Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (12 books in 4 volumes or "Movements). First, you may be too bored to continue (so buy only the first volume to start). "Nothing" happens in the first two volumes I've read. Fans of action, suspense, romance, light, or even historical novels may be most unhappy with this series. For the many characters living through the 1920's and '30's described in the first two movements, life is an endless round of parties and conversations over food, through which the characters, in ever mutating combinations, drift while insightfully discussing each other. In a sense this is high-brow and high-toned soap opera. Only in Book 6, as World War II impinges on the characters, does an outside structure of events impose itself on the actions and reactions of the characters. Previously they have seemed largely to float in an hermetically sealed world of university-educated gentlemen and their women (mothers, wives, and ex-wives). In this upper class void no chronological dates are supplied, although if you are an octogenerian the names dropped may supply a framework to the intricate sets of flashbacks and occasional anticipations Powell employs. We learn much about the main characters, but rarely see them at work or play, and never domestically or with children.

The second hazard is that you may be forever spoiled for reading anything less well crafted. The next author you read after Powell may seem shallow, simplistic, juvenile, obvious, crude, banal, overheated, or even vulgar. Powell's writing is objective, distanced, understated, intricate, subtle, acute, and highly precise; the apotheosis of ordinary detail. Powell's strength lies in closely observed and particularized character development, our understanding of each person altering slightly from one vignette, glimpse, or reference to the next. Allegedly a masterpiece of comedic writing, "Dance" is not, however, funny, farcical, or obviously, satirical. I really think it takes an English person to see and enjoy fully the comedy of manners I sense behind the prose. I felt I was always on the outside, vaguely aware that people might be not quite right, or "dotty," except for one passage in Book 5 where I laughed out loud. I probably need an "Annotated Powell."

You can see I'm deeply conflicted about this series: it is marvelously well-written yet I am not well entertained. An honest reviewer admitted that Powell "evokes a wry poetry from drabness and boredom." It took me 5 years to finish the first Movement, and dogged determination to read the next, and still I want to read one more! Just not immediately.

_A Dance to the Music of Time_ is an extremely absorbing and well-crafted novel (composed of 12 smaller novels). Its subject is the decline of the English upper classes from the First World War to about 1970, a decline seen is inevitable and probably necessary, but somehow also regrettable.

Such a description might make the novel seem stuffy, but it is not. _A Dance to the Music of Time_ is at times very funny indeed, and always interesting. always involving. It features an enormous cast of characters, and Powell has the remarkable ability to make his characters memorable with the briefest of descriptions. In addition, Powell's prose is addictive: very characteristic, idiosyncratic, and elegant.

The long novel follows the life of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, from his time at Eton just after World War I to retirement in the English countryside in the late '60s. But Jenkins, though the narrator, is in many ways not the most important character. The comic villain Widmerpool, a creature of pure will, and awkward malevolence, is the other fulcrum around which the novel pivots.

This second volume of the University of Chicago's beautiful trade paperback editions features books 4, 5 and 6 of the novel series. _At Lady Molly's_ is centered around the eccentric title character and her parties, as well as such other characters as her eccentric husband, Ted Jeavons, and even Nick Jenkins' wife-to-be, Isobel. _Casanova's Chinese Restaurant_ opens with a bravura prose set-piece of flashback within flashback, and deals with Jenkins' great friend the composer Hugh Moreland, and with the tragically unhappily married critic Maclintick. The subject of the novel is marriage. The last novel in this book is _The Kindly Ones_, which deals with the coming of World War II. It begins with a flashback to 1914, as the First World War breaks out and impinges on Jenkins' childhood, then continues in the late '30s as Europe heads again into war.

This volume contains the second three novels of Anthony Powell's masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time. Readers coming to this series for the first time should start with the first volume. Powell's work is social comedy in the tradition of Jane Austen and George Meredith. Contemporary writers with whom he is often compared include Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh. The 12 short novels of A Dance to the Music of Time give a panoramic picture of English upper-class social life from 1921 to 1971 that is both intensely realistic and amazingly funny. Readers either love Powell's work or can't understand what others see in it. My own opinion is that Dance is the best novel written in the twentieth century. Others share this view: A Dance to the Music of Time is #43 on the recently constructed Random House/Modern Library 100 Best Poll (of twentieth century fiction) and was made into a 4-part miniseries on British television just about a year ago.

I'm into the home stretch of Powell's Top 100 Modern novel series (in a sense, like Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," this series by Powell is a meta-novel; unlike Tolkien, however, Powell was the one to split his sections into separate books), and it is gaining momentum, mainly because of the inertia gained from having placed this much of a time investment into the series. The title of this novel has to be my favorite, and the anecdote within the book from which it comes is quite amusing--a character receives the nickname books for his statement, upon entering the library of a home in which he is about to commit an adulterous act with the wife of a prominent book person that "books do furnish a room." This kind of droll, understated, and somewhat dark humor is indicative of Powell's series.

This picks up in the aftermath of World War II, as Jenkins and his friends attempt to return to life as civilians. Jenkins becomes the book review editor for a magazine that was endowed by his brother-in-law, Erry, and is also supported by Widmerpool, newly elected MP. Jenkins is fascinated with the novelist X. Trappable, a strange free spirit of words who is constantly in debt and quite deft with "the touch" (i.e., borrowing from friends and acquaintances), yet who can follow up a touch with the offer of buying a beer for the person from whom he just borrowed a quid. Trapnel finds himself entranced by Pamela Widmerpool, but, as readers of the previous book should know, this is doomed to be disadvantageous to everyone involved by Pamela herself.

The description of how a small literary magazine was run in the post-war era is quite interesting, and unfortunately put in the background as Powell features the actions of the characters. Jenkins sees the magazine as a job, and his interest, as always, is in the gossip that can be provided by the changing of partners in this complex dance of life. Maybe I'm just a wallflower, who finds more beauty in the decorations than in just who is dancing with who on the floor. However, midnight is drawing near on the dance, and most couples are, as Molly Ivins would say, "dancing with the one what brung ya." It will be amusing to see if there are any coaches turning into pumpkins in the last two books.

The second novel in the 12-part Dance to the Music of Time series. I enjoyed this one a little more than the first volume. I believe this due to the first volume's need to introduce and elaborate on the four main characters. Nicholas Jenkins, our narrator, who I complained about being almost invisible in the first book, starts taking on shape here, dissembling on love and ambition. Stringham and Templar are still here, and by the end of the book, both married, but the real main character here is Widmerpool, the young man with the least social status, but with the most ambition of the four.

The first book was about the four in grade school to university; this one is about their initial entry into society, including romance and marriage. It is within the context of his feelings for the opposite sex that we finally start to understand Jenkins, but even he is overshadowed here by the fumblings and failings of Widmerpool, who first pines for the heart of Barbara, then falls in with a "bad" girl.

I'm still unsure whether Powell is a writer for me. Although I do enjoy mysteries and puzzles and admire books that are clever, I still like to get a feeling that I have solved the mystery by the end of the book. I believe that a character here gets an abortion, but as it is never spelled out (Jenkins is too much a gentlemen to actually put it into raw language), I wonder if I am reading between the lines correctly.

After the first book, I was not sure that I would continue the series, but since I have the first three in an omnibus volume, I decided to continue on. If the following books make the same jump in readability and interest as between the first two, the twelfth book will likely be my all-time-favorite novel.