Anthony Powell

Third Movement

A dance to the music of time

Fourth Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time

At Lady Molly's

The Acceptance World

Kindly Ones (Flamingo)

The Valley of Bones

The Soldier's Art (Dance to the Music of Time)

The Military Philosophers

Hearing Secret Harmonies

Primavera

Una Danza Para La Musica del Tiempo

View of the the English upper class, as seen through the eyes of Nicholas Jenkins. It is 1941 and Nicholas settles for a stoical co-existence with the Blitz, though death is thinning the ranks of his pre-war associates.

The Soldier's Art

The first novel Anthony Powell published following the completion of his epic A Dance to the Music of Time, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! fulfills perhaps every author’s fantasy as it skewers a conceited, lazy, and dishonest critic. A writer who avoids serving in World War II and veers in and out of marriage, G. F. H. Shadbold ultimately falls victim to the title’s spinning—and righteous—emblem of chance. Sophisticated and a bit cruel, Wheel’s tale of posthumous vengeance is, nonetheless, irresistible. Written at the peak of the late British master’s extraordinary literary career, this novel offers profound insight into the mind of a great artist whose unequaled style, ear for dialogue, and eye for irony will delight devotees and new readers alike.

A Novel

O, How the Wheel Becomes It!

The Valley of Bones. [read by Simon Callow].

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books. A Question of Upbringing (1951) introduces us to the young Nick Jenkins and his housemates at boarding school in the years just after World War I. Boyhood pranks and visits from relatives bring to life the amusements and longueurs of schooldays even as they reveal characters and traits that will follow Jenkins and his friends through adolescence and beyond: Peter Templer, a rich, passionate womanizer; Charles Stringham, aristocratic and louche; and Kenneth Widmerpool, awkward and unhappy, yet strikingly ambitious. By the end of the novel, Jenkins has finished university and is setting out on a life in London; old ties are fraying, new ones are forming, and the first steps of the dance are well underway. "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 "A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times "One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker “The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”—Kingsley Amis “There is no other work in the annals of European fiction that attempts meticulously to recreate half a century of history, decade by decade, with anything like the emotional precision or details of Powell’s twelve volumes. Neither Balzac’s panorama of the Restoration, nor Zola’s chronicles of the Second Empire, nor Proust’s reveries in the Belle Epoque can match a comparable span of time, an attention to variations within it, or a compositional intricacy capable of uniting them into a single narrative. . . . The elegance of this artifice was only compatible with comedy.”—Perry Anderson

Book 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time

A Question of Upbringing

Afternoon Men

A Dance to the Music of Time – his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the intellectual, cultural and social hurdles that stand between them and the “Acceptance World.”

A literary conference in Venice brings together a host of individuals whose romantic involvements with Lady Widmerpool endanger their lives.

Temporary Kings

'He is, as Proust was before him, the great literary chronicler of his culture in his time.' GUARDIAN 'A Dance to the Music of Time' is universally acknowledged as one of the great works of English literature. Reissued now in this definitive edition, it stands ready to delight and entrance a new generation of readers. In the eleventh volume in the series, Nick Jenkins, persuaded by his old friend Mark Members, attends a literary conference in Venice. Meanwhile, old school pal Widmerpool continues to climb the ranks, this time as a Life Peer. But his position in power is under threat when he becomes the subject of whispered accusations of espionage, and wife Pamela, former lover of the dead writer X. Trapnel, also finds herself the centre of attention, as the mystery around the writer continues to draw ghoulish interest from readers and academics alike. Even in Venice, surrounded by the beautiful vistas of the city, Nick cannot escape his friends’ turbulent lives.

Anthony Powell

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