A dance for the music of the time is a monumental literary fresco with more than three hundred characters, whose action takes place between 1914 and 1970, and whose title is inspired by a famous painting by Poussin. It is considered one of the pinnacles of 20th century English literature and has been compared by many critics to Proust's In Search of Lost Time, in its very British way. It consists of twelve novels that can be grouped into four volumes, each of which has a station as a generic title. This first volume corresponds to Spring and includes the novels A problem of formation, A buyer's market and The world of acceptance. In them the protagonist and narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, appears in the early 1920s, during his last year at a prestigious school. And through his story the reader meets the tormented fat man Widmerpool, the object of ridicule and who will end up triumphing in the world of business and power; the aristocratic Stringham; to Templer, the enterprising son of a new rich man, and to the capricious Jean, the latter's sister, with whom Jenkins falls in love.