A Dance to the Music of Time

Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times, A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses. Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician. -- Chicago Tribune Powell has a quality all his own. Irony and understatement are parts of this quality, but more essential ingredients are the sheer delight of form, stylization and rhythm.