A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement

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. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.

In this climactic volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but now the losses, physical and moral, must be counted. 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:
Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies

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


Author: Anthony Powell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 05/31/1995
Pages: 804
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.10lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.20w x 2.00d
ISBN: 9780226677187


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/1995

About the Author
Anthony Powell's work includes Miscellaneous Verdicts and Under Review, both available from the University of Chicago Press.