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A Dance to the Music of Time: Third Movement

Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."

A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, 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 and continues through the 1950s and all the changes to life, society, and relationships those shifting eras bring. 

In this third volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, we again meet Widmerpool, doggedly rising in rank; Jenkins, shifted from one dismal army post to another; Stringham, heroically emerging from alcoholism; Templer, still on his eternal sexual quest. Here, too, we are introduced to Pamela Flitton, one of the most beautiful and dangerous women in modern fiction. Wickedly barbed in its wit, uncanny in its seismographic recording of human emotions and social currents, this saga stands as an unsurpassed rendering of England's finest yet most costly hour.

"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give Dance a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Includes these novels:
The Valley of Bones
The Soldier's Art
The Military Philosophers

See all volumes of Dance to the Music of Time.


731 pages | 5-1/4 x 8 | © 1995

Fiction

Reviews

"A comic masterpiece, and the major achievement in post-war English fiction."

Bernard Bergonzi | The Guardian

“A great chronicle. . . . Absolutely fascinating and the most important fiction since the war. . . . I would rather read Powell than any English novelist now writing.
 

Kingsley Amis

"Dry, cool, humorous, elaborately and accurately constructed and quintessentially English. It is more realistic than A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, to which it is often compared, and much funnier."

Evelyn Waugh

“Immensely entertaining and deeply serious. . . . Reading Powell is like living someone else's life, inextricably tangled with one's own."

New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . A vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human existence."

Naomi Bliven | New Yorker

“I had that usual "'why-on-earth-didn't-i-think-of-that feeling I always get when I read your  books. I study the stuff under a microscope, and I still can’t see how you do it.”

P. G. Wodehouse | letter to Anthony Powell

"A series of intertwining stories, in mood at once hilarious, raffish, and melancholy. . . . The reader who likes to watch history unfold as social comedy while he savors the astringent taste of the best English prose is urged to immerse himself in the works of this astute and enchanting writer."

Arthur Schlesinger | Life Magazine

"A book which creates a world and eplores it in depth, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and complicated as Proust's."

Elizabeth Janeway | New York Times

"When the time comes for the historian to get a sense of what life was like for the British between and during the two wars he can wrap up the whole era with Anthony Powell's incalculably brilliant series."

Time Magazine

"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

"The best modern novel since Ulysses."

Clive James

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