I’ve been somewhere tonight that Ant has never been and frankly, I’m thinking maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s better to discuss how posh people lay the cutlery for dinner parties than life at the bottom. And I have only myself to blame. [Much, much later: the rest of this entry has been cut on the g...
Who is Widmerpool? The question that is to dog Nicholas Jenkins crystallizes as he sees the gawky figure of his schoolmate huffing through the mists on a solitary cross-country run. So unexceptional, unsmart -- even unpopular -- Widmerpool continues to drop in and out of Jenkins life through scho...
Books Do Furnish a Room (1971) is the tenth of Anthony Powell's twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of TimeBooks Do Furnish a Room follows straight on from the preceding trio of war volumes (The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier's Art (1966), and The Military Philosophers (1968)) and tak...
The seventh novel in Powell’s series, “A Dance to the Music of Time,” starts with narrator Nick Jenkins in basic training in the army at the beginning of WWII, first in England, then in Ireland. The title refers to the passage in Ezekiel where the prophet has a vision of a valley of dry bones in...
The first volume of Summer, the second of four trilogies of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Synopsis followed by What I Thought.In this synopsis I’m quite sure there's nothing that need be hidden within the folds of spoilers. I've used Hilary Spurling's brief overview of the chapters...
A Dance to the Music of Time – his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the intellectual, cultural a...
This is the final novel in Anthony Powell’s twelve novel series, “A Dance to the Music of Time,” all narrated by the writer Nick Jenkins, now in his fifties and sixties, the novel opening with a chapter devoted to Nick and his wife Isobel hosting their niece Fiona and her three companions who are...
A Dance to the Music of Time – his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the intellectual, cultural a...
A Dance to the Music of Time – his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the intellectual, cultural...
A Dance to the Music of Time – his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the intellectual, cultural...
Rolled shirt-sleeves, green baize apron, conferred a misleadingly businesslike appearance, instantly dispelled by carpet-slippers of untold shabbiness which encased his large, chronically tender feet. All work except cooking abhorrent to him, he went through the required movements with an air of ...
Deacon’s work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death. The canvases were none of them familiar, but they recalled especially, with all kind of other things, dinner at the Walpole-Wilsons’, reviving with a jerk that phase of early life. They ma...
Room, smell, food, company, at first seemed unchanged; as ever, unenchanting. On taking a seat at table I remembered with suddenly renewed sense of internal discomfort that Stringham would be on duty. In the pressure of other things that had been happening, I had forgotten about him. However, whe...