I didn't relish this: not least because it meant that I didn't break my silence till the cheese course

I don't even care for harmless, comic coincidences. I once went out to dinner and discovered that the seven other people present had all just finished reading A Dance to the Music of Time. I didn't relish this: not least because it meant that I didn't break my silence till the cheese course.

J. Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), 70-71

I got the impression that it was going to keep going without even getting going

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