A Dance to the Music of Time: Third Movement

by Anthony Powell

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226677170
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/31/1995
Series:	Dance to the Music of Time Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	731
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Anthony Powell (1905-2000) was one of the most critically acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century. His landmark twelve-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, was named to the Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of the twentieth century. His other novels include Afternoon Men, Venusberg, From a View to a Death, Agents and Patients, What's Become of Waring?, O, How the Wheel Becomes It!, and The Fisher King, all published by the University of Chicago Press. A condensed version of his four-volume memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling, is also available from the University of Chicago Press.

What People are Saying About This

Evelyn Waugh

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.

Kingsley Amis

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

ONE OF THE 100 BEST NOVELS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

The Modern Library

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

New York Times

"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

"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 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

"The best modern novel since Ulysses."

Clive James

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

The Guardian - Bernard Bergonzi

"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."

New Yorker - Naomi Bliven

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.

letter to Anthony Powell - P. G. Wodehouse

"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."

New York Times - Elizabeth Janeway

"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."

Life Magazine - Arthur Schlesinger

A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders challenging 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 complex as Proust's. -- The New York Times

Elizabeth Janeway

The most sophisticated chronicle of modern life we have. -- New Republic

C. David Benson

"The way in which Powell invests the whole of the book with parallels, variations and ironic reversals of this legend is wonderously rich and subtle."
--Time

Christopher Porterfield

"One of the most important works of fiction since the second world war....a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."
--The New Yorker

Naomi Bliven

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change.....Powel's world is as large and complex as Proust's."
--New York Times

Elizabeth Janeway

"A comic masterpiece, and a major achievement in post-war English fiction."
--The Guardian

Bernard Bergonzi

"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 of the best English prose is urged to immerse himself in the works and this astute and enchanting writing."
--Life Magazine

Arthur Schlesinger