Secret Harmonies

The Society’s journal Secret Harmonies is an occasional publication containing articles of more academic content, or of greater length, than is appropriate for the quarterly Newsletter. The contents of each issue to date are listed below, with a link to download a PDF copy of the complete issue. Download links are normally available for all except the most recent issue. Printed copies of back issues (where available) may be purchased through the Society’s online shop.

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Issue 11, Summer 2026

Growing Apart: Recognition, Misrecognition and Maturity in A Question of Upbringing; Nicholas Birns
The Dance Commences: 75th Anniversary of A Question of Upbringing; Jeff Manley
From a Chase to a View; Julian Maclaren-Ross
Pstringham & Co: Anthony Powell and the school story; Simon Barnes
Balzac Revisited; Bernard Stacey
At Lady Violet's; Hilary Spurling
A Taste for Intrigue: Anthony Powell and the disarmament of the Belgian resistance; Jason White
"Invention, action, poetry": Anthony Powell and Dickens; Colin Donald
Grandmother's Footsteps: cartomancy and the "everyday" occult in Dance; Daniel O’Sullivan

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Issue 10, Spring 2023

‘The Natural Condition of an Intelligent Man’: Anthony Powell and same-sex Society; Philip Hensher
Into the Dust Heap and out again: another look at Malcolm Muggeridgel; Jeff Manley
Stevenson, Proust and Powell: early reading, eavesdropping, coincidence, report; Elwin Taylor
Magic in Action: Coincidence in A Dance to the Music of Time Simon Barnes

Download Issue 10

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Issue 9, Autumn 2020

The Longevity of Anthony Powell; Perry Anderson
The Lost Girls; DJ Taylor
What Maisky Knew; Simon Barnes
Inez Holden, Anthony Powell and Some Others; Jeff Manley
Coincidentals; Inez Holden
“Never say you know the last words about any human heart”; John Roe
Sergeant Delius and the Horse-faced Dwarf; Tom Miller
An Interview with Alvin Rakoff; Paul Milliken

Download Issue 9

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Issue 8, Spring 2018

The War Horns of Cunedda: AP and Welshness; Clive Gwatkin Jenkins
Borage and Hellebore: the Many Sides of Anthony Powell’s Art; Nicholas Birns
Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant; Stephen Lloyd
Sustainable Austerity: Powell, Gather, Manning and the Imaginative Effect of the Great War; Nicholas Birns
Architecture in Dance; Harry Mount
Agents, Patients and Talking Picture: Two Old Etonians in Late-Weimar Berlin; Jeffrey Manley
What’s the Bleeding Time?; Tom Miller
Anthony Powell’s Secret Harmonies: Music in a Jungian Key; Margaret Boe Birns
Understanding Widmerpool; Michael Henle Lady Violet Powell’s Autobiography
A History of Chantry; David Rawlins

Download Issue 8

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Double Issue 6/7, Autumn 2016

Was There a Powell Generation?; Mark Facknitz
Friends Do Furnish a Novel – Exploring Male Friendships in A Dance to the Music of Time; Gabriella Walfridson
Epiphanies; Peter Kislinger
Waiting for (Dr) Belkin; Edwin Bock
The End of the Dance; Grey Gowrie
The Politics of the Dance; Vernon Bogdanor
“Think First, Fight Afterwards” – The Soldier’s Art; AN Wilson
Anthony Powell Interviewed by Colin Donald, 29 May 1992 at The Chantry
Singing a Would-Be King through Comic Invective: Jenkins as Widmerpool’s “Inexorable Accessory”; Ashley Herum
AD Powell and the Transactions of the Radnorshire Society; Keith Marshall
Dance for Everybody? Teaching and Living Powell’s Fiction; Nicholas Birns
BOOK REVIEWS: Olivia Manning
BOOK REVIEW: DJ Taylor; At the Chime of the City Clock: A Thriller
BOOK REVIEW: Literary Parodies

Download Issue 6/7

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Double Issue 4/5, Summer 2011

The Genius of Osbert Lancaster; James Knox
Always At The Ritz: Anthony Powell, Modernist Design and the Visual Arts in Britain; Jonathan Black
Public Contentions and Private Egotisms: Dance and the Politics of the Thirties; Paul Delany
Anthony Powell and the Bright Young People; DJ Taylor
Name that Tune! Preparing a Guide to Musical References in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time; Jeffrey Manley
To the Theatre, the Cinema, the Film Studios, and on Picnics in “The Oakland” on the “Good Roads” of Southern California; John Powell
Dance for Readers. Introduction; Keith Marshall
Dance for Readers. Trilogy One: I Could Have Danced All Night; Stephen Eggins
Dance for Readers. Trilogy Two: Flashback, Flashforward; Peter Kislinger
Dance for Readers. Trilogy Three: The War; Christine Berberich
Dance for Readers. Trilogy Four: Trapnel’s Trilogy; Nicholas Birns
BOOK REVIEW: Ferdinand Mount, Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes
BOOK REVIEW: James Knox, Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster
BOOK REVIEW: Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A Life
BOOK REVIEW: James Lees-Milne, Diaries 1984-1997
BOOK REVIEW: Julian Maclaren-Ross, Selected Letters
BOOK REVIEW: Stephen Klimczuk & Gerald Warner, Secret Places; Hidden Sanctuaries: Uncovering Mysterious Sights, Symbols & Societies

Download Issue 4/5

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Issue 3, Autumn 2009

Widmerpool: Fair Do’s for the Scapegoat; Terry Empson
Edward Burra; Laura Miller
Come Dancing; Tariq Ali
Julia and Flavia; Nicholas Birns
His Shadow Behind Me: Influence of Anthony Powell on the “Gus Cotton” Novels of Ferdinand Mount; Jeffrey Manley
Powell on Nicolas Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time; DeAnn DeLuna
Kenneth Widmerpool: A Jaundiced View; Bernard Stacey
BOOK REVIEW: DJ Taylor, Bright Young People: the Rise and Fall of a Generation; 1918-1940
BOOK REVIEW: Christopher Harvie, A Floating Commonwealth: Politics; Culture and Technology on Britain’s Atlantic Coast; 1860-1930
BOOK REVIEW: Jane Stevenson, Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye
BOOK REVIEW: Terence Blacker, You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson
BOOK REVIEW: James Allason, Ringside Seat: the Political and Wartime Memoirs of James Allason

Download Issue 3

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Issue 2, October 2007

Anthony Powell: “Man of Letters” and Literary Editor; Jeremy Treglown
Revisiting the Gap in Dance‘s Narrating Instance; Robert Selig
Anthony Powell’s Americans: Introduction; Anthony & Joanne Edmonds
Anthony Powell’s Americans: Russell Gwinnett – Intensely American, yet Allergic to American Life; Joanne Edmonds
Anthony Powell’s Americans: Louis Glober – The American Magnate as Likable Guy (More or Less); Anthony Edmonds
Two Lost Souls: An Extended Comparison of Evelyn Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Powell’s Charles Stringham; Christine Berberich
Anthony Powell and the Twentieth Century; Nicholas Birns
The Widmerpool Files: Released by MI5 under the Thirty Year Rule; Julian Allason & Nigel West
A Powell Tease; Patric Dickinson
The Bluffer’s Guide to Dance: How to Blag Your Way to Becoming an Authority on Anthony Powell’s Masterpiece; Julian Allason
BOOK REVIEW. Koyama Taichi, The Novels of Anthony Powell: A Critical Study
BOOK REVIEW. VS Naipaul, A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling
BOOK REVIEW. Richard Greene (ed), Graham Greene: a Life in Letters
BOOK REVIEW. Ed Gilbert, West End Chronicles: 300 Years of Glamour and Excess in the Heart of London and Literary London: a Street by Street Exploration of the Capital’s Literary Heritage

Download Issue 2

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Issue 1, October 2006

From Poussin to Burton: The Evolving Narrator in A Dance to the Music of Time; James J Scott
When the Time Came; Allison Rung
Let the Dance Resume: Echoes of Anthony Powell in the Fiction of DJ Taylor; Jeffrey Manley
Cult and Occult in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time; John Potter
The Scotsman, 21 January 1995; Colin Donald
Widmerpool versus MI5; Julian Allason
BOOK REVIEW: Patrick Parrinder; Nation & Novel
BOOK REVIEW: AN Wilson; Betjeman
BOOK REVIEW: James Lees-Milne; The Milk of Paradise: Diaries 1993-1997

Download Issue 1

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