In this first volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, 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.
Strangely Like Real Life
My own prime favourite is Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time: panoramic, sharply observed, farcical, ironic, yet shot through with what Kingsley Amis called an...
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