Books Do Furnish a Room

Ten books into Powell's 12 novel Dance to the Music of Time cycle and the quality has not slipped. This novel sequence isn't talked about much (compared to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or even Song of Ice and Fire) but it is a great accomplishment and deserves status as possibly the greatest novel sequence in English. Subtle, light in tone and incredibly insightful psychologically, it is an extraordinary document of life in Britain in the fifty years 1921-1951, encompassing the literary and music worlds, politics, war and romance and much else. Highly recommended.

‰ЫПThe General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.‰Ыќ

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“Neat, sad, geared perfectly in outward appearance to the sombre nature of the occasion, Tolland stood, head slightly bent, gazing at the damp grass beneath his feet. He had once admitted to having travelled as far as Singapore. One wondered how he had ever managed to get there and back again.”