About ten years ago (actually, on checking the dates, it turns out to have been fourteen) I abandoned A Dance to the Music of Time after volume 5: Casanova's Chinese Restaurant. No one could say that, after twelve hundred pages, I hadn't given Powell a chance, though that's effectively what my father-in-law did say. It really gets going in volume 6, he claimed, though I suspect that had I announced my retirement after The Kindly Ones (volume 6), he'd have pointed ahead to volume 7, The Valley of Bones. I got the impression that it was going to keep going without even getting going. Neither witty nor entertaining, except in that passing-the-time sort of way that is almost synonymous with wasting time, it seemed entirely devoid of merit.
G. Dyer, The last days of Roger Federer (2022), 74
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