Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions


A Dance to the Music of Time: Movements I-IV
Anthony Powell, 1951-1975
University of Chicago Press


In Brief
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times."

• 1st Movement (214 pp.) opens just after World War I. Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art.

   Includes these novels (1951-55):
    —A Question of Upbringing
    —A Buyer's Market
    —The Acceptance

• 2nd Movement (724 pp.) is set in London, where in the background the rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of World War II. Even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.).

    Includes these novels (1957-62):
    —At Lady Molly's
    —Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
    —The Kindly Ones

• 3rd Movement (736 pp.) follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. 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.

    Includes these novels (1964-68):
    —The Valley of Bones
    —The Soldier's Art
    —The Military Philosophers

• 4th Movement (804 pp.) is the climactic volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, in which England has won the war and must now count the losses—physical and moral. Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. Pamela Widmerpool sets a snare for the young writer Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.

    Includes these novels (1971-75):
    —Books Do Furnish a Room
    —Temporary Kings
    —Hearing Secret Harmonies

(Adapted from the publisher's synopses.)

top of page


About the Author

• Birth—December 21, 1905
• Where—Westminster, England, UK
• Death—March 28, 2000
• Where—Somerset, England
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—James Tait Memorial Prize.


Powell was born in Westminster, England, to Philip Powell and Maud Wells-Dymoke. His father was an officer in the Welch Regiment, although by happenstance rather than from pride in his rather distant Welsh lineage. His mother came from a land-owning family in Lincolnshire with pretensions, though no incontrovertible claim, to aristocratic descent.

After World War I, Powell attended Eaton, a career marked by what he recalled as "well-deserved obscurity" in "the worst house in the school." He felt no enthusiasm for the games that brought popularity and prestige. In 1923, he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read history. He later said that he experienced a loss of intellectual vitality rather than stimulation from his new environmement. Shortly after his arrival he was introduced to the Hypocrites Club, a lively and bibulous gathering that did not attract the aesthetes or the conspicuously well-behaved.

In 1926, Powell went to work in London in a form of apprenticeship at Duckworth publishing house and lived in a small, rather seedy enclave tucked away among the grand houses of Mayfair. His social life developed around attendance at formal debutante dances in white tie and tails at houses in Mayfair or Belgravia. Without telling his friends he joined a Territorial Army regiment in a South London suburb and for two or three evenings a week dined in mess, then spent a couple of hours under instruction in the riding school. He renewed acquaintance with Evelyn Waugh, whom he had known at Oxford and who introduced him to the Gargoyle Club, in Soho, which gave Powell a foothold in London's Bohemia. Between 1931 and 1940, Powell published four novels, married Lady Violet Pakenham, moved to a flat in Bloomsbury (where E.M. Forster made a quick surreptitious inspection of the new arrival), and tried his hand as a film studio script writer, and became a father.

When war arrived, was called to duty as a Second Lieutenant at the end of 1939. The war, he recalled, "led not only into a new life, but entirely out of an old one, to which there was no return. Nothing was ever the same again." At first, serving as a trainer in a regiment posted in Northern Ireland, he eventually was attached to a division in military itellengence, carrying out various posts. When the war ended he was 39.

After several fits and starts, Powell recieved a small legacy, purchased a house, called The Chantry in Somerset (not far from Bath), and returned to writing. He began to ponder a long novel sequence. At an early stage, he found himself in a museum in London standing before Nicholas Poussin's painting A Dance to the Music of Time, which struck him as conveying graphically the rhythms and complexities of relationships and events as he wished to describe them.

In parallel with his creative writing, he served as the primary fiction reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, and in 1953 was appointed Literary Editor of Punch, in which capacity he served until 1959. From 1958 to 1990, he was a regular reviewer for The Daily Telegraph, resigning after a vitriolic personal attack on him by Auberon Waugh was published in the newspaper. He also reviewed occasionally for The Spectator. He served as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 1962 to 1976. With Lady Violet, he travelled to the United States, India, Guatemala, Italy, and Greece.

Through his writings, Anthony Powell would go on to international fame. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1956, and in 1973 he declined an offer of knighthood. He was appointed Companion of Honour (CH) in 1988. He published two more freestanding novels, O, How The Wheel Becomes It! (1983) and The Fisher King (1986). Two volumes of critical essays, Miscellaneous Verdicts (1990) and Under Review (1992), reprint many of his book reviews. Powell's Journals, covering the years 1982 to 1992, were published between 1995 and 1997. His Writer's Notebook was published posthumously in 2001, and a third volume of critical essays, Some Poets, Artists, and a Reference for Mellors, appeared in 2005.

He died peacefully at his home, The Chantry, aged 94 on 28 March 2000. (All author information adapted from Wikipedia.)

top of page


Critics Say. . .
An often overlooked treasure. It's hard to understand why Anthony Powell's magnificent opus isn't on the tip of everyone's tongue. Critics and readers agree that Powell, who died in 2000, was one of the finest, and most readable, writers of the English novel....In Dance fictional events intertwine with the 20th-century's great historical events. The overarching question the book ponders is .... Read more
Molly Lunquist - LitLovers LitPick



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 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

Readers Say...
(When books have been around for a long time, there are few mainstream critical reviews online. So we try to include helpful ones from Amazon customers.)

War and Loss: One feels somehow quite melancholy in turning the last page to Powell's Third Movement. There are several reasons for this emotion, not the least of which is the gradual manifestation of a reflection Nick makes about halfway through The Soldier's Art, the second book in the movement:

That is one of the conceptions most difficult for stupid people to grasp. They always suppose some ponderable alteration will make the human condition more bearable. The only hope of survival is the realisation that no such thing could possibly happen.

"That is one of the conceptions most difficult for stupid people to grasp. They always suppose some ponderable alteration will make the human condition more bearable. The only hope of survival is the realisation that no such thing could possibly happenThis is turning out to be a lovely work of literature indeed, though I find myself in sad agreement with another reviewer here that it's probably, like Proust, "not everyone's cup of tea." As Nick reflects in "The Valley of Bones," the first book [of the 3rd Movement]:

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are inconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

Powell's opus is that sort of book.
Reviewer - Daniel Myers, South Carolina, 12/10/07



Hazardous Reading: There are two hazards in reading Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (12 books in 4 volumes or "Movements). First, you may be too bored to continue (so buy only the first volume to start). "Nothing" happens in the first two volumes I've read. Fans of action, suspense, romance, light, or even historical novels may be most unhappy with this series. For the many characters living through the 1920's and '30's described in the first two movements, life is an endless round of parties and conversations over food, through which the characters, in ever mutating combinations, drift while insightfully discussing each other. In a sense this is high-brow and high-toned soap opera. Only in Book 6, as World War II impinges on the characters, does an outside structure of events impose itself on the actions and reactions of the characters. Previously they have seemed largely to float in an hermetically sealed world of university-educated gentlemen and their women (mothers, wives, and ex-wives). In this upper class void no chronological dates are supplied, although if you are an octogenerian the names dropped may supply a framework to the intricate sets of flashbacks and occasional anticipations Powell employs. We learn much about the main characters, but rarely see them at work or play, and never domestically or with children.

The second hazard is that you may be forever spoiled for reading anything less well crafted. The next author you read after Powell may seem shallow, simplistic, juvenile, obvious, crude, banal, overheated, or even vulgar. Powell's writing is objective, distanced, understated, intricate, subtle, acute, and highly precise; the apotheosis of ordinary detail. Powell's strength lies in closely observed and particularized character development, our understanding of each person altering slightly from one vignette, glimpse, or reference to the next. Allegedly a masterpiece of comedic writing, "Dance" is not, however, funny, farcical, or obviously, satirical. I really think it takes an English person to see and enjoy fully the comedy of manners I sense behind the prose. I felt I was always on the outside, vaguely aware that people might be not quite right, or "dotty," except for one passage in Book 5 where I laughed out loud. I probably need an "Annotated Powell."

You can see I'm deeply conflicted about this series: it is marvelously well-written yet I am not well entertained. An honest reviewer admitted that Powell "evokes a wry poetry from drabness and boredom." It took me 5 years to finish the first Movement, and dogged determination to read the next, and still I want to read one more! Just not immediately.
Reviewer - tertius3, Michigan, 12/11/01



Powell's Great Novel: This is an extremely absorbing and well-crafted work, composed of 12 smaller novels. Its subject is the decline of the English upper classes from the First World War to about 1970, a decline seen is inevitable and probably necessary, but somehow also regrettable.

Such a description might make the novel seem stuffy, but it is not. The novel is at times very funny indeed, and always interesting. always involving. It features an enormous cast of characters, and Powell has the remarkable ability to make his characters memorable with the briefest of descriptions. In addition, Powell's prose is addictive: very characteristic, idiosyncratic, and elegant.

The long novel follows the life of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, from his time at Eton just after World War I to retirement in the English countryside in the late '60s. But Jenkins, though the narrator, is in many ways not the most important character. The comic villain Widmerpool, a creature of pure will, and awkward malevolence, is the other fulcrum around which the novel pivots....
Reviewer - Richard Horton, Missouri, USA, 7/14/2000

top of page


Book Club Discussion Questions

Sorry, no dance here—the publisher has not made any questions available for this book.

But don't despair. Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

   • Generic Discussion Questions
   • Read-Think-Talk About a Book

Also, try a few of our LITLOVERS DISCUSSION POINTERS to get you started.

1. Talk about how the four young men we meet in the first volume suggest "types" in society, i.e., artist, romantic, cynic, and man of will. What characteristics do each of the four possess that follow "type"? Are those types still relevant today? Are there other "types" you might add?

2. Widmerpool is one of the work's most interesting, if unpleasant, characters. What do the incidents of the banana smashed in his face and, in France, his scolding of Jenkins about his poor manners reveal about Widmerpool and his future career in business and politics?

3. Take any one or number of the individual book titles and talk about its (symbolic) meaning or relevance to the events of the story. For instance, what is the "buyer's market" in the second novel? What are the "commodities" being offered at all the social gatherings Jenkins attends? Or at the work's end... who are the"military philosophers" and what philosophy gets espoused?

4. Discuss the title, A Dance to The Music of Time, and its artistic provenance from Nicholas Poussaint's painting. What does it suggest about the quality of life—does it hint at life as a series of random events or the unfolding of an orderly plan? Refer to Jenkin's thoughts about the painting and how it reflects his version of life.

5. During the first two Movements, how do the events of two world wars, one past and one on the horizon, shape the lives of the main characters? From our vantage of historical hindsight, it is hard for readers not to see characters' destinies as already charted (or fated) by the historical events that hang over them. Do you feel that way, or not?

6. Jenkins rejects a life or career based on an exertion of will (as we see in Widmerpool or Sir Magnus), preferring instead a more "romantic" inaction or passiveness. But once he meets Conyers, he recognizes a different type of willfulness—an "introverted will," which he approves. What does he mean by introverted will and how does it differ from Widmerpool's type of willfulness?

7. Talk about the role of women in A Dance—how do they reflect the men who become involved with them. Consider, for instance, Mildred and Conyer's remark that the man who marries her must be "a man with a will of his own." Or what about Jenkins' affair with with Gypsy Jones and his later marriage to Isobel. Do women have any real concrete role in this work at all...or are they merely reflections of the men who surround them?

8. Over the course of this opus, how does Nick Jenkins change? The war, in particular, changes his life, destroying many of his connections with the past. If we define ourselves by our previous experiences, the past, how does Nick learn to compensate, how does he come to redefine his identity?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)