Selected Journalism

Powell started writing reviews, particularly literary ones, to pay the rent, but continued long after that ceased to be a problem. The template included a certain world-weariness, considerable knowledge, great perceptiveness – as one would expect – derived from an inside track on how writing worked, good jokes, and often a patrician sign-off, holding the author in question to task for some error: perhaps for referring to the wife of a knight by the address proper to the daughter of a duke.

Towards the end of his life he decided that the best of them deserved to be preserved in book form. He edited two collections: first Miscellaneous Verdicts and then Under Review. They were described as 'Writings on Writers'. Both were published by Heinemann, his regular publishers. They are substantial works in every sense. They cover his contemporaries and the great figures of world literature, and they are physically big: over four hundred pages each of small print.

Although AP consciously took on what is now called 'The Canon', giving us his considered thoughts on all the greats from Aphra Behn to PG Wodehouse there are moments of naughtiness. Despite a long section on 'Bloomsbury', Virginia Woolf gets mentioned only in passing and then to be compared disparagingly with Arnold Bennett. That no doubt caused vigorous turning in the grave on her part (her cremated remains were buried beneath an elm tree in the garden of her home in Sussex, if Wikipedia is to be trusted), to the limited extent that she 'did' vigour.

There was to be a similar third volume. AP extended his range to include painters, sculptors, poets, writers from the byways of the literary tradition. He wrote about the concepts of bohemianism and surrealism and how (as regards Bernard Berenson anyway) picture-collecting worked. He edited it and sent it to Heinemann. They sat on it, finally deciding that they did not want to publish it. In the meantime, they mislaid about a third of the copy. The truncated text was published in 2005, after AP's death, by a smaller publisher, Timewell Press, under the name – intended by AP for the full work – Some Poets, Artists and 'a Reference for Mellors'.

The Society's first volume, the fourth overall, Anthony Powell on Wine, collected the pieces that he wrote for Cyril Ray's The Compleat Imbiber and a few more by him and Lady Violet about food and drink. It includes Lady Violet's account of buying Bordeaux wine in barrels and bottling it – the two of them and their two sons – in the basement of The Chantry, wearing gum boots in case of vinous spillage. It is unique among wine books for shining with the author's love for his subject but without the least idea of showing off. Vintages, for example, are never compared.

Volume five (our second) was King Arthur and Other Personages, a survey of AP's fascination with the Arthurian legends and other weird stuff, such as the theories about Jesus and Mary Magdelene that made Dan Brown so very rich. All of that was very much linked to The Fisher King, AP's last and curiously overlooked novel. AP was keen on and knowledgeable about archaeology, being a friend of Sir Mortimer Wheeler and indeed a biographer of John Aubrey, who discovered the stone circle at Avebury – superior, one understands, to Stonehenge. He also surefootedly dissects the history of the Dark and Middle Ages, correcting lazy assumptions here and there, and displaying an infectious enthusiasm.

With volume six, our third, we return to the literary and artistic fray. We publish the pieces that Heinemann lost. We have added a few articles from AP's 'probable rejects' pile, meticulously preserved by John Powell along with the more sure-fire winners such those on Conrad or Proust. We think these latter worth publishing, partly through intrinsic interest and partly as relevant to topics recently aired within the Society, such as AP's relationship with Malcolm Muggeridge and that (if at all) with JIM Stewart, another writer of romans fleuve and something of a fan. The Lost Heinemann Files and Christmas with Kafka was published in 2026. As to 'Christmas with Kafka', you will have o buy the book to find out!