Anthony Powell: A Life

In this biography of Anthony Powell, publisher, journalist, man-about-town and author of the “Dance to the Music of Time” sequence, Michael Barber takes a close look at the man and the writer. He finds someone whose temperament was often at war with his upbrining.

The son of an army officer, educated at Eton and Balliol, Powell chose as his closest friends people like Malcolm Muggeridge and the composer, Constant Lambert, who were not out ot the top drawer or the one below it. And, although happily married for over sixty years to Lady Violet Pakenham, the daughter of an earl, he admitted that he had “always been attracted by girls who looked as they’d slept under a bush for a week”. Powell believed that creative writing was, like alchemy, a mysterious, indefinable proces by which experience became art.

Michael Barberfocuses on the experience that provided Powell with his raw material. He pays particular attention to the “entre-deux-guerres”, that sharply divided cultural interlude when the artists and good-timers with whom Powell identified in the twenties were followed, in the thirties, by the politicians and the prigs.