The English author Anthony Dymoke Powell was born in London on 21 December 1905. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford where he met several other young writers and artists including Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, John Betjeman, Graham Greene and Osbert Lancaster. Prior to World War II he worked in publishing and as a film-script writer, before becoming a full-time novelist and literary critic.
The Anthony Powell Society is a charity made up of members across the world particularly in the UK and North America who wish to promote interest in Powell and his work. Powell had a wide range of friends from George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh to V.S. Naipaul, Harold Pinter and Philip Larkin. Fans of Powell have similarly always been found across the political and literary spectrum : Kingsley Amis, Clive James, Tariq Ali, A.N.Wilson and Lady Pinter to name just a few. Hilary Spurling’s official biography is an invaluable guide to his life including the background to his literary masterpiece : the 12 volume sequence of novels entitled ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’. A TV film of ‘Dance’ was made by Channel 4 in 1997 and starred Simon Russell Beale in a BAFTA winning performance.
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Each recriminative decade poses new riddles, how best to live, how best to write. One's fifties, in principle less acceptable than one's forties, at least confirm most worst suspicions about life, thereby disposing of an appreciable tract of vain expectation, standardized fantasy, obstructive to writing, as to living. The quinquagenarian may not be master of himself, he is, notwithstanding, master of a passable miscellany of experience on which to draw when forming opinions, distorted or the reverse, at least up to a point his own. After passing the half-century, one unavoidable conclusion is that many things seemingly incredible on starting out, are, in fact, by no means located in an area beyond belief.
[Anthony Powell; Temporary Kings]
