A Question of Upbringing

Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic creates a rich panorama of twentieth-century London. 'He is, as Proust was before him, the great literary chronicler of his culture in his time.' GUARDIAN 'A Dance to the Music of Time' is universally acknowledged as one of the great works of English literature. Reissued now in this definitive edition, it stands ready to delight and entrance a new generation of readers. In this first volume, Nick Jenkins is introduced to the ebbs and flows of life at boarding school in the 1920s, spent in the company of his friends- Peter Templer, Charles Stringham, and Kenneth Widmerpool. Though their days are filled with visits from relatives and boyish pranks, usually at the expense of their housemaster Le Bas, a disastrous trip in Templer's car threatens their new friendship. As the school year comes to a close, the young men are faced with the prospects of adulthood, and with finding their place in the world.

About the Author :
Anthony Powell was an only child, born in 1905. As a young man he worked for a crumbling publishing business whilst trying to find time to write novels. He moved in a bohemian world of struggling writers and artists, which was to provide the raw material for much of his fiction. During the Second World War he served in Military Intelligence Liaison. He subsequently became a fiction reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and for five years he was the literary editor of the now-defunct magazine Punch. Meanwhile he continued to work on the twelve-novel sequence 'A Dance to the Music of Time'. He was the author of seven other novels, and four volumes of memoirs. His many reviews for the Daily Telegraph are also published in collected volumes. Anthony Powell died in March 2000.

Review :
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. 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. “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. 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. The novels of Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time” themselves move hand in hand in intricate measure through the last century, bearing wisdom and understanding for the present. In an ever-quicker, ever-shallower world, his steadiness and wit reliably escort the reader into depth and patience. Nobody gives pattern to the spectacle of human existence like Powell. 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. Reading “A Dance to the Music of Time” was such a joyous experience, I remember wishing there'd been more than twelve volumes. 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 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.