... The early steps of the Dance, or, The young Anthony Powell.
The first book I ever reviewed for The Inquirer - back in 1976, if memory serves - was Hearing Secret Harmonies, the final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The problem was, when I took on the assignment, I hadn't read any of the previous 11 volumes. So I sat down and read the whole series. I liked it. I should read it again sometime.
I strongly recommend that you do read the whole of "Dance" if you enjoyed it all those years ago. As you know, it is a history of the recent 20th. century past in England which is a most delicate and tough-minded annal-novel, if I may put it like that. It also pays fine hommage to Proust towards the end of "The Military Philosophers" when the scales fall from the eyes of the narrator, Nick Jenkins, and he realizes, exhausted, sitting in a jeep, at the end of the war that he is leaving Cabourg (Proust's Balbec) and finds himself "briefly in tears". One of the marvellous aspects of the 12 novels is that although they take their cue from Proust, they are not at all a palid English pastiche. An English comedy of manners with a darkling tone, I have read the series at least half-a-dozen times since sitting in my bath 40 years ago (when only nine of the twelve vols. had been published), and I expect to read them all again before the dance becomes more solemn. Anthony Powell was one of the great prose stylists of the middle 20th. century along with Patrick White, Elizabeth Bowen and Nadine Gordimer, and it gives me great pleasure to extoll his "Dance" here and, I hope, to encourage others to enjoy it.
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