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A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement
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A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement Paperback - 1995 - 1st Edition

by Anthony Powell


About this book

A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve-volume series of novels by Anthony Powell. One of the longest works of fiction in literature, the work is often published as four volumes of three novels each. The title, A Dance to the Music of Time, was inspired by Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the same name, which depicts the four seasons as nymphs dancing in a circle while a winged Father Time plays the harp.

The epic work is narrated through the memories of Nick Jenkins, an “everyman” recalling the people he met over the previous half-century. Yet A Dance to the Music of Time is less about Jenkins and more about the metropolitan circles he inhabits. Beginning with the end of World War I and ending with the turbulence of the 1960s, the novels highlight encounters between friends and lovers who drift apart but continue to reencounter each other over time. Apart from a trip to France, some time in Ireland, and an interval in Venice, the series mainly takes place in England and is often read as a reflection of the country’s social history.

In its entirety, A Dance to the Music of Time is composed of the following novels: A Question of Upbringing (1951), A Buyer's Market (1952), The Acceptance World (1955), At Lady Molly's (1957), Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), The Kindly Ones (1962), The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier's Art (1966), The Military Philosophers (1968), Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), Temporary Kings (1973), and Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975).

The books were a great success in both Britain and America upon their publication. The series is ranked 43rd on Modern Library’s “100 Best” English-language novels of the 20th century. It is also listed on TIME’s “100 Best Novels” (since 1923) and the Telegraph’s list of the 20 best British and Irish novels of all time.

From the publisher

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

From the rear cover

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.

First Edition Identification

William Heinemann is the original publisher of the A Dance to the Music of Time novels. Published from 1951 through 1975, all twelve first editions in the set are uniformly bound in dark red cloth with spines lettered in gilt in black title blocks.

Details

  • Title A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement
  • Author Anthony Powell
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition number 1st
  • Edition 1
  • Pages 804
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Chicago Press, Chicago
  • Date 1995-05-31
  • ISBN 9780226677187 / 0226677184
  • Weight 2.1 lbs (0.95 kg)
  • Dimensions 8 x 5.2 x 2 in (20.32 x 13.21 x 5.08 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Historical fiction, Autobiographical fiction
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 94047228
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

Media reviews

Citations

  • Library Journal, 08/01/1995, Page 0

About the author

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