A Dance to the Music of Time

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A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve-volume cycle of novels by Anthony Powell, inspired by the painting of the same name by Nicolas Poussin. One of the longest works of fiction in literature, it was published between 1951 and 1975 to critical acclaim. The story is an often comic examination of movements and manners, power and passivity in English political, cultural and military life in the mid 20th century.

The sequence is narrated by Nick Jenkins in the form of his reminiscences. Over the course of the following volumes, he recalls the people he met over the previous half a century. Little is told of Jenkins's personal life beyond his encounters with the great and the bad, with events, such as his wife's miscarriage, only being related in conversation with the principal characters. Nick mainly functions as a cipher, reporting on the actions of the other characters, specifically the inscrutable Kenneth Widmerpool who is arguably the protagonist of the series

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Tropes used in A Dance to the Music of Time include:

• The Alcoholic: Charles Stringham
• An Officer and a Gentleman: Nick and his father before him
• Anything That Moves: Dear god Pamela
• Big Fancy House : The Tollands own one, also Sir Magnus Donners' house keeps coming up
• The Casanova: Peter Templer
• Cloudcuckoolander: General Liddament
• The Dog Bites Back: When Widmerpool climbs to a position of power in the military he manages to send both Peter and Charles to their deaths for the way they treated him at school
• Doorstopper
• Femme Fatale: Pamela
• First-Person Peripheral Narrator: Nick serves as the narrator, however Widmerpool is the protaganist of the series.
• Full-Frontal Assault: A few of the women do this to the point where it becomes kind of a motif
• Geek/Nerd Widmerpool
• Genteel Interbellum Setting: The first few books are set between the wars
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: The flipside is on display here in that the women who get abortions are definitely bad girls
• Happily Married: Nick and Isabel, in contrast to almost everyone else
• I Love the Dead : Allegedly Russell Gwinnett
• Lots and Lots of Characters
• Mood Whiplash: The books mix together the satirical and the soap operatic
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Many of the characters are based on real people, who exactly is a matter of some speculation but some of the possibilities are George Orwell, Harold Pinter, and Aleister Crowley
• One Degree of Separation
• Out with a Bang: Ferrand-Seneschal and Pamela
• Peeping Tom: Widmerpool, also Sir Magnus Donners
• Rich Bitch: Pamela
• Second Love: Isabel to Nick
• Stylistic Suck: the novels of St. John Clare who "confines himself to the dullest of dull ideas"
• Unsexy Sadist: Scorp Murtlock
• The Vamp: Pamela again
• World War II