A Dance to the Music of Time: Third Movement - Paperback

by Anthony Powell (Author)

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

Back Jacket

In this third volume of '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.

Author Biography

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.