Invitation to the Dance

This is the first complete guide to Anthony Powell's classic sequence of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time. Its main item is a Who's Who of characters, fiction and factual, from Lord Aberavon to Hitler ('I like the little man they've got in Germany now': Uncle Giles), Marx ('Summoned by planchette and leaves a message for Quiggin after Sunday luncheon at the Templars'), Stalin ('Mrs Widmerpool's hero and prospective second husband') and that most memorable character of twentieth-century fiction, Kenneth Widmerpool himself. Three further indexes, with full page references and extensive quotations, cover respectively all the books, paintings and places visited or mentioned, and a synopsis of events clarifies trickier points of chronology. Readable and comprehensive, Hilary Spurling's handbook is as fascinating to the general reader as it is invaluable to the scholar.