Anthony Powell
Dancing to the Music of Time
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- US$13.99
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The author of the award-winning Matisse: A Life gives us the definitive biography of writer Anthony Powell--and takes us deep into the heart of twentieth-century London's literary life.
Insightful, lively, and enthralling, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal era in London’s literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic literary figure. Best known for his twelve-volume comic masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, the prolific writer and critic Anthony Powell (1905–2000) kept company between the two world wars with rowdy, hard-up writers and painters—and painters’ models—in the London where Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis loomed large. He counted Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green among his lifelong friends, and his circle included the Sitwells, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, Hilary Spurling—herself a longtime friend of Powell’s as well as an award-winning biographer—has produced a fresh and powerful portrait of the man and his times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This comprehensive authorized biography from Spurling (Matisse: A Life) chronicles in meticulous detail the life and work of English novelist Anthony Powell (1905 2000), whose masterpiece is A Dance to the Music of Time. Published in 12 volumes between 1951 and 1975, this Proustian saga surveys the follies and foibles of hundreds of mostly privileged Britons over several decades through the eyes of its self-effacing narrator, Nicholas Jenkins. Of particular interest to Dance aficionados will be the models for such characters as Kenneth Widmerpool, the cycle's egregious striver. A keen observer of the human comedy, Powell had an "innate genius for friendship," as noted by V.S. Naipaul, whom Powell encouraged early in his career. Powell's detractors, most notably Auberon Waugh, dismissed him as a snob and disparaged Dance, but his far more numerous admirers knew him as a reserved, often witty man devoted to his craft. Spurling, a longtime friend of her subject, wisely chooses to cover the last, relatively uneventful 25 years of his life in a postscript. This is not the place to start for those who have never read Powell, but his many American fans will be rewarded.
