Temporary Kings is a novel by Anthony Powell, the penultimate in his twelve-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time.

Temporary Kings has been characterized as a novel in the post-war consensus of literary compromise.

[1] It also demonstrates Powell's evocation of art at all levels, most notably an (imaginary) Venetian ceiling painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo[2] Temporary Kings received the W. H. Smith Prize in 1974.

His nature is to be uniform: there is hardly a ragged edge or an un-calculated incongruity anywhere in this urbane discourse, where the catastrophes are never witnessed, only inferred from scenes in themselves comic.

If the new characters have not quite the flavour of the earlier Gileses and Jeavonses, and the range of the social panorama now appears less than it once seemed, the flow of reappearances and transformations is powerful enough to carry the series through that 'Dance to the Music of Time' whose discipline and formal rhythm do recall Poussin, the artist its title invokes: except that it is a great deal more fun.