An erudite companion to Anthony Powell's 12-volume masterwork, A Dance to the Music of Time, which The NewYorker hailed as "one of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War."A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark of 20th-century literature—but as the reader cavorts through the 12-volume novel alongside the narrator Nicholas Jenkins, it soon becomes apparent that he, too, confuses dates and events. Here, Hilary Spurling places every detail in its proper place. A magnificent database of Powell's imagination and England's cultural landscape, Invitation to the Dance encompasses more than 400 characters and one million words of Powell's lively epic.