The Valley Of Bones

He has wit, style, and panache, in a world where those qualities are in permanently short supply

The New York Review of Books

Incalculably brilliant

TIME Magazine

[A] comic masterpiece

Irish Times

Comic, satisfying, thought-provoking, addictive

The Telegraph

One of the great novel-sequences in English Literature – a wonderful portrait of society, full of insight into the complexities of human behaviour, richly detailed and shrewdly funny.

William Boyd

Discovering Anthony Powell’s "A Dance to the Music of Time" has been one of the greatest pleasures of my reading life. The cool elegance of the prose, the deliciously dry humour, the confident choreography of his characters made for an incomparable treat. Twelve volumes was simply not enough.

Michael Palin

"A Dance To The Music of Time" is an epic, elegant masterpiece, so full of lightness and comedy that you're unprepared for how it quietly wrecks your heart.

Lauren Groff

Powell’s novel sequence is at once a rich chronicle of 20th-century English social life and an intricately wrought work of art. It is also extremely funny, in its sly fashion.

John Banville

A masterful stylist and a wise, often hilarious observer of human nature and his times, Anthony Powell is an under-appreciated literary gem. The pleasures and dramas of the "Dance" continue to illuminate daily life.

Claire Messud

I re-read the "Dance" every five years or so and always find something new – the world has changed but the characters are evergreen. Everybody has a Widmerpool in their life.

Daisy Goodwin

Reading "A Dance to the Music of Time" was such a joyous experience, I remember wishing there'd been more than twelve volumes.

Roddy Doyle

The novels of Powell’s "A Dance to the Music of Time" themselves move hand in hand in intricate measure through the last century, bearing wisdom and understanding for the present. In an ever-quicker, ever-shallower world, his steadiness and wit reliably escort the reader into depth and patience. Nobody gives pattern to the spectacle of human existence like Powell.

Louisa Young

It's his supreme skill in mastering a lengthily interwoven chronicle, the evolution of such a range and variety of pin-point characters, the wit and the cultural ambition that give the novel a unique place in English Literature.

Melvyn Bragg

'I would rather read Mr Powell than any English novelist now writing'

Kingsley Amis

'The Valley of Bones is sheer delight.It is immaculate in period and military detail; it praises duty, while at the same time making educated play of its absurdities; it recognises heroism, but is swift to prick pretension; it evokes a wry poetry from drabness and boredom; and it is exceedingly funny throughout'

Observer

'Incalculably brilliant'

TIME

'I find Powell the sort of writer who exerts such a strong pull that turning anyone else's books, after his, calls for an effort of will... One of the most individual tones of voice in contemporary novel-writing and one of the most artful'

Norman Shrapnel, Guardian

'I think it is now becoming clear that A Dance to the Music of Time is going to become the greatest modern novel since Ulysses'

Clive James