One of the great novel-sequences in English Literature - a wonderful portrait of society, full of insight into the complexities of human behaviour, richly detailed and shrewdly funny. A Dance To The Music of Time is an epic, elegant masterpiece, so full of lightness and comedy that you're unprepared for how it quietly wrecks your heart. ... Read more Discovering Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time has been one of the greatest pleasures of my reading life. The cool elegance of the prose, the deliciously dry humour, the confident choreography of his characters make for an incomparable treat. Powell's novel sequence is at once a rich chronicle of 20th-century English social life and an intricately wrought work of art. It is also extremely funny, in its sly fashion. A masterful stylist and a wise, often hilarious observer of human nature and his times, Anthony Powell is an under-appreciated literary gem. The pleasures and dramas of the Dance continue to illuminate daily life. I re-read the Dance every five years or so and always find something new - the world has changed but the characters are evergreen. Everybody has a Widmerpool in their life. He has wit, style, and panache, in a world where those qualities are in permanently short supply
The New York Review of Books
[A] comic masterpiece
Irish Times
Comic, satisfying, thought-provoking, addictive
Daily Telegraph
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